The 10th Scale Up Cohort: Eight Companies Built From Within the Community

Eight founders join Scale Up by Endeavor Greece. Together they've raised close to $45M and created 150+ jobs across six cities and two continents.

The surest sign that a startup ecosystem has grown up isn't a single breakout company. It's the moment its founders begin funding, mentoring, and hiring the next generation of founders. That is the story of the 10th cycle of Scale Up by Endeavor Greece.

Scale Up is the first international program in Greece to select and support some of the most promising founders in the world - people either directly connected to the country or looking to build lasting ties with it. Its portfolio now actively supports 50 companies that have collectively raised more than $650 million since founding and created over 2,500 jobs worldwide.

The eight companies joining this cycle have together raised close to $45 million to date and created more than 150 jobs internationally. They're headquartered across six cities on two continents - Athens, Boston, Cambridge, Nicosia, San Francisco, and Seattle - and work in some of the most technically demanding corners of the global economy, from microsatellites to healthtech.

What sets this cohort apart is where its founders come from: Endeavor's own community.

The community, compounding

"This year, in the tenth cycle of Scale Up, we see the multiplier effect more vividly than ever - the ultimate measure of an entrepreneur's success for our organization," says Eliso Kotsieva, Head of Portfolio at Endeavor Greece. "These new founders come from within our own community: Endeavor Entrepreneurs, mentors, and board members who were once their employers, their first investors, and the reason they found their way to us."

The connections run right through the cohort. Verno Labs counts Haris Pylarinos of Hack The Box - today an Endeavor Entrepreneur, and formerly part of Scale Up - among its investors. Alexandros Petkos of Philon worked at PNOE before starting his own company, and now has PNOE's two founders, Panos and Apostolos, both Endeavor Entrepreneurs, as angel investors. Oumi counts a member of Endeavor's global board among its backers. And one company continues its journey with Endeavor as one of the 21 companies from the Greek AI Accelerator recently run with OpenAI and the Greek Government.

"This is the community we are trying to build," Kotsieva adds, "one where every founder who succeeds becomes the first investor, mentor, or employer of the next. That is how the Greek ecosystem becomes more visible, more connected, and more compelling - with its people pulling one another up."

The eight companies

Damisa - Cross-border B2B payments still crawl through chains of banks, taking days and stacking up hidden fees. Damisa settles them in hours, using stablecoins as an invisible bridge so the client never has to touch crypto. Businesses can collect and pay in more than 70 currencies with a single, transparent fee. Founded in December 2024, it recently announced a partnership with dLocal to expand across Asia-Pacific. Co-founded by Jordan Lawrence, Panos Dandolas, and Maximilian Marenbach.

Deepmirror - Developing a drug means testing thousands of molecules to find the few that are safe and effective - a process that can take years. Deepmirror is an AI platform that helps chemists surface the most promising molecules far faster, without building their own AI tools or handing their intellectual property to third parties. A spin-out from the University of Cambridge that launched in 2023, it's used today by more than 100 organizations worldwide. Co-founded by Max Jakobs, Andrea Dimitracopoulos, and Ryan Greenhalgh.

Diffraqtion - Today's satellite cameras throw away roughly 95% of the information carried by the light that reaches them, hitting a physical limit on how far and how clearly a satellite or telescope can see. Diffraqtion builds a "quantum camera" that lets satellites and telescopes see up to 20 times more clearly and process images up to 1,000 times faster - giving a small satellite the capabilities of far larger, far costlier systems. A spin-out from MIT and the University of Maryland, it has raised more than $4 million, won the SLUSH 100 competition among more than 1,000 startups, and works with DARPA, NASA, and the U.S. Space Force. Co-founded by Johannes Galatsanos, Christine Wang, and Saikat Guha.

Novabook - Founders lose enormous amounts of time to bookkeeping, payroll, and taxes - work no one warns them about until a deadline is missed. Novabook is an accounting service built specifically for founders, by founders: it handles the books, payroll, and tax filings so they can stay focused on growth, with every client getting a dedicated certified accountant they can reach directly. Founded in 2024 by the team behind Seneca Learning - the education platform with 14 million users, acquired by GoStudent in 2022. Co-founded by Stephen Wilks and Lukas Feddern.

Orom.ai - For a robot or autonomous machine to move safely, it has to "see" the space around it in three dimensions and in real time - something that usually demands expensive sensors like LiDAR or a connection to the cloud. Orom.ai does it with a single ordinary camera, running entirely on the device so images never leave the machine - a design suited to regulated or sensitive environments. The result is an accurate 3D map at a fraction of the cost of specialized systems. Based in Cyprus, it is supported by the NVIDIA Inception Program and was selected for the OpenAI Accelerator run by Endeavor with OpenAI and the Greek Government. Co-founded by Charis Christofi, Demetris Marnerides, and Christos Makris.

Oumi - The development of frontier AI models has concentrated in a handful of closed labs, and even "open" models tend to hide the data and methods needed to reproduce them. Oumi is building what its founders call "the Linux moment of AI": the first fully open platform, offering not just the models but the code, the data, and the training recipes, so researchers and companies can build specialized models of their own. It raised a $10 million seed round from Venrock and Obvious Ventures and works with 13 leading research universities, including MIT, Stanford, and Cambridge. Founded by Manos Koukoumidis.

Philon - A vast amount of dangerous, repetitive, or simply tedious manual work still requires people, because there are no general-purpose robots yet capable of handling varied real-world tasks. Philon is building open-source general-purpose robots for exactly this kind of work, starting with the collection of the large datasets needed to train such systems. Founded in 2025, it has been selected by Y Combinator and Project Europe. Founded by Alexandros Petkos.

Verno Labs - As companies put "AI agents" - autonomous programs that make decisions and take actions on their own - into production, they open a new and invisible attack surface that traditional security tools can't see. Verno Labs deliberately and safely attacks a company's AI agents to find the gaps before real attackers do, detecting attacks in real time and recommending fixes. It raised a $1.6 million pre-seed led by Marathon Venture Capital, with participation from executives at AWS, Meta, Google, Hack The Box, and Workable. Co-founded by Pavlos Mitsoulis and Dionysis Varelas.

How they were chosen

The eight companies were evaluated and selected by 24 members of Endeavor's network - Endeavor Entrepreneurs, mentors, and distinguished board members - including Marios Stavropoulos (Founder & CEO of Ademú, Founder & former CEO of Softomotive), Andreas Stavropoulos (Vice Chairman of Endeavor Greece and Partner at Threshold Ventures), Dean Dakolias (President of Asset Management at Rithm Capital and Endeavor Greece board member), Kostas Mallios (Corporate Vice President at Applied Materials), Nikos Bonatsos (Founder & Managing Director at Verdict Capital), Ioannis Papapanagiotou (Principal Engineer at Google), Stratos Molyviatis (Group COO at the National Bank of Greece), Ippokratis Pandis (Distinguished Engineer at Databricks), Charietta Eleftherochorinou (Managing Partner at Olea Venture Partners), and Sofia Kouzinopoulos (Vice President, Portfolio Human Capital at General Atlantic), among others.

Eight companies and one throughline: a community where success compounds, founder by founder.