VentureFriends

Apostolos Apostolakis is an angel of marketplaces who leverages founding experience at e-shop.gr, e-food and Beat to offer hands-on guidance on liquidity and supply-demand mechanics, prioritizing founder mindset and coachability.

George Dimopoulos, co-founder of one of Greece’s first private VC firms, pairs ~€17bn M&A experience with hands-on angel investing, focusing on fintech, proptech and SaaS while representing Greece’s startups internationally.

Alistair Owen is a principal whose rare operator-to-builder-to-investor background—industrial engineering at BP, hands-on venture building at Deep Science Ventures, and founding multiple CleanTech startups—focuses on AI-enabled products and climate/industrial applications.

Michal Bas is a Director at Montis VC, a pre-seed and seed-stage venture capital firm investing in energy, industrial, and resilience technologies. He previously held positions at VentureFriends, a European pre-seed fund; TDJ Pitango Ventures, a Polish-Israeli Series A fund; and PFR Ventures, Central and Eastern Europe's largest fund-of-funds. Bas holds an MSc in Strategic Management from HEC Paris and a BA in Economics and Business with East European Studies from University College London.

Pavlos Pavlakis pairs hands-on strategy and finance leadership at last-mile logistics marketplace Quiqup with structured real-estate finance, educating founders through guides and serving as a bridge to the VC world.

Lily Joo is a Korean-American venture partner with 16k+ LinkedIn followers, bilingual in English and Korean, maintaining dual investing roles and uniquely positioned to bridge Europe–Asia scale-up challenges for founders.

Anna Lauring has worked in the startup ecosystem for around five years. She previously worked on the startup team at Amazon Web Services, supporting founders from Pre-seed to Series C with a focus on B2B SaaS and B2C companies. She holds an MA in Business Management from the University of Edinburgh.

Fivos Tsoukatos is an early-stage lead investor writing checks of $330K–$2.8M, with a broad European seed portfolio, often taking governance roles as board observer and teaching founders through masterclasses.

George Karabelas applies a structured decision‑science approach—using formal decision‑analysis and prioritizing decision quality over outcomes—and, as co‑founder of ThinkBiz, helped build Greece’s university startup ecosystem.

Maria Piotrowska works in venture capital with a background in strategy. She previously served as a Senior Associate at ffVC, a US-European fund with $300M AUM, where she supported nine investments ranging from Pre-Seed to Series A, and earlier gained experience at Inovo VC and Boston Consulting Group. She holds double-degree master's degrees from HEC Paris and Bocconi University and a bachelor's degree from Kozminski University.

Vicky Alexiou has an accounting and finance background with more than 15 years of experience. She previously served as Assistant Financial Reporting Manager at GasLog Ltd, a formerly NYSE-listed international shipping group, where she focused on SEC financial reporting and SOX compliance, and earlier worked at PwC on assurance services for integrated audits of US-listed entities and IPOs. She is a Fellow of the ACCA and holds a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration from the Athens University of Economics and Business.