Funding Deep-Tech Startups: An Interview with Guy Krief, Partner at Big Pi Ventures and President, La French Tech Athens

By Eric Soderquist, Director, MBA International Program

Anchored in Greece, targeting global markets, Big Pi Ventures partners with teams who are developing exceptional technologies or ingenious business models. The fund invests where it sees opportunities to change people’s lives for the better or transform whole industries.

Big Pi supports, with capital and advice born out of experience, early-stage scalable ventures where technology and intellectual property are core to the value proposition. Big Pi requires that funded companies have or build a substantial part of their operations in Greece.

1. Tell us about how Big Pi came about, what its main mission is and how it differentiates from other funds in the Greek VC market.

Big Pi was launched in 2018 by Marco Veremis, Alex Eleftheriadis, and Aristos Doxiadis. Around that time, many VC funds were created in Greece, largely thanks to the European Investment Fund (EIF) allocating significant capital in 2017 to foster venture activity. This led to the creation of about 7–8 funds, including Uni.Fund, Metavallon, and Marathon, among others.

It’s mission is to support exceptional founders with a connection to Greece—whether based here or Greeks abroad—and help them build world-class companies.

Big Pi 1 was a €48 million fund that made 23 investments, including Accusonus (AI audio), which was acquired by Meta, Anodyne (biotech), and Intelligencia AI (AI-driven drug development). Overall, the Big Pi 1 portfolio includes several very strong companies. Typically, a fund’s lifecycle is 10 years: five years to deploy the capital and five years to manage and exit investments. That’s the phase Big Pi 1 is in today.

Big Pi 2 launched in 2023 as a €70 million fund and has already made seven investments. This time, the focus is even more firmly on deep-tech. We invest mainly at pre-seed and seed stages, typically taking a lead investor role. With four partners bringing complementary skills, we take a very active role in supporting portfolio companies. Our approach is “tech-first”—not just tech-enabled—meaning companies must have strong IP. We invest in companies with a meaningful connection to Greece, whether through their operations, founders, customers, or other links.

2. What are the most promising technology sectors in Greece? Where do you see the greatest potential and why is that?

It’s hard to point to specific verticals. We focus more on technologies than on industries. Greece has a strong pool of engineering and AI talent, with excellent universities and an educational system that consistently produces top-tier graduates.

Additionally, there’s a very talented crypto community here, and we’ve already seen impressive companies emerging around blockchain and decentralized technologies.

Beyond that, it’s not just about one sector; Greece has great engineering talent capable of building world-class companies across a wide range of technologies.

3. It sounds promising that this talent opens the field for technology startups and new ventures to thrive out of Greece!

Sometimes we see that a hampering factor for tech startups in Greece is the lack of “competent customers”, because the industry ecosystem is not that tech driven compared to many other countries in Europe of the size of Greece. Do you think that this is indeed hampering tech startups, is this something that they work around, and do they have to go abroad to find these customers that pull innovation?

I believe that most, if not all, tech startups founded in Greece view the world as their market—not just Greece, or the U.S., or any specific country.

There are very few cases where Greece is the primary target market, simply because it’s too small. But that’s actually a good thing: it forces teams to think internationally from day one. If you’re doing SaaS, particularly self-serve SaaS, you can sell globally from Greece—as Workable and other companies have shown.

However, once you move into enterprise sales, where you need boots on the ground, it becomes more complicated. That’s where additional funding and setting up operations abroad—such as in the U.S.—become necessary. Only a few Greek companies, like Blueground, Persado, and Workable, have successfully navigated that transition.

Coming back to your point about customers: one important change is happening in the shipping sector. Greece controls a large percentage of the global shipping industry, and while historically slow to digitize, shipping companies are now accelerating their tech adoption. This creates real opportunities for Greek tech startups focused on shipping.

Companies like DeepSea (AI solutions for decarbonization) and MarineTraffic (maritime intelligence) have shown the potential. Today, shipping is a sector where strong local customers exist, driven partly by regulatory pressures like carbon emission reductions.

4. That is very interesting and positive too. Indeed, the shipping industry is very important in Greece, and it makes sense to have stronger connections between shipping and the deep-tech sector to support the transformation that you describe.

Returning to the core of your activity, deep-tech funding, what are the biggest challenges deep-tech startups in Greece face when seeking funding? And what advice would you give to these entrepreneurs when they seek funding?

Deep-tech is tough. By definition, it involves technologies that could be highly disruptive, but it also carries significantly higher risk—especially around whether the technology will actually work.

For most VC investors, minimizing risk is critical. They typically want to see early signs of product-market fit, customer traction, and market validation. In deep-tech, you rarely have any of that initially, making it harder to justify an investment.

Moreover, deep-tech innovations are often contrarian to industry norms, so commercialization strategies are less straightforward—pricing, customer segmentation, and even the product definition itself can be very uncertain.

Because of these factors, private investors often shy away from deep-tech, and public funding becomes crucial.

In the U.S., for example, the Biden administration allocated large federal funds for green tech and other deep-tech areas. France has similar initiatives with dedicated deep-tech investment programs.

Deep-tech has both higher potential and higher risk, and public support is essential to bridge that gap.

5. How does this work here in Greece? Do we have similar structures that aim in that direction? I mean, funds like yours can do a lot, but as you mentioned, you cannot be alone without a conscious state policy and concrete state support.

You’re absolutely right. Another important aspect is the transfer of IP from universities. In many countries, this process is mature and straightforward. For example, in France, if you develop technology in a research center, you can spin off a company and secure exclusive IP rights relatively easily.

In Greece, recent legislation has created a framework for university spin-offs and IP transfer, but it’s still early days—the system is not yet fully mature.

That’s one reason why we see relatively few pure deep-tech startups originating directly from Greek universities.

What we can do today is focus on building a pipeline: attracting deep-tech operations and R&D to Greece, training young engineers, and supporting talent so that in a few years, they are ready to launch their own companies. This is how we can lay the groundwork for a stronger deep-tech ecosystem.

6. You mentioned risk. How do you assess risk and what are your safeguards in terms of what you look into before you decide to invest in one of these promising but by nature risky ventures?

Over the life of our fund, we’ll probably end up making about 18 investments. Not all investments carry the same risk/reward profile—some are higher risk with higher potential, others are lower risk with more moderate upside.

What we consistently look for is technology that solves a significant, painful problem for a well-defined group of users who are willing to pay for a solution.

The technology must also be defensible—it should be hard to replicate and meaningfully different from existing solutions.

And most importantly, at our early investment stage, we heavily back the founders themselves. The company’s success is still largely driven by the founders’ skills, resilience, and capacity to build a world-class business.

7. Indeed, the founder and the founding team are very important, as we also teach in all entrepreneurship courses.

Finally, what would be your wish-list for a more favorable environment and context for enabling growth and facilitating support of deep-tech ventures in Greece?

I would love to see stronger entrepreneurial education and a bigger focus on research commercialization in universities and research centers.

Also, it’s critical to have stable public support—such as grants, non-dilutive funding, and special financing schemes for deep-tech ventures.

France’s model, with BPI (the Public Investment Bank), is a great example: founders there can receive €3–4 million in non-dilutive funding without having to pitch to private investors. This gives deep-tech startups critical breathing room to develop technologies that need longer lead times before commercialization.

We absolutely need to get the conditions right in Greece so that talent and deep-tech companies are attracted to stay and grow here.

If we can make Greece a welcoming place for top tech entrepreneurs, the entire ecosystem will benefit and move upwards.

First and foremost, we must keep building and strengthening the Greek tech ecosystem. Deep-tech will be the pinnacle of that, but it will take time before we see a broad economic impact.

Thank you very much Guy for this enlightening conversation! Relating to the last part, in the MBA International we have for long placed strong emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation, having both core courses and many related electives, also with tech and AI focus. Over the years, these courses, that also have many guest lectures from the market, have become increasingly popular among the students.

I further like to mention the recent partnership we have established with La French Tech Athens, where you are the President, and which is part of the global La French Tech initiative within the French Ministry of Economy. La French Tech supports the structuring and growth of the French start-up ecosystem in France and internationally.

Also, what brought us together from the beginning was the French Tibi Initiative named after its initiator and likewise Visiting Professor in the MBA International program, Philippe Tibi. This initiative, now also in its second phase and managing €22 billion to date, encourages institutional investors to invest in the most innovative technology companies. It is our great pleasure to work together on diffusing learnings from it to Greece.

So, we look very much forward to developing these initiatives to the benefit of students, graduates and the broad community of the i-MBA and AUEB.