The Panathenea 2026 festival hosted by Athens and dedicated to the international world of startups, has a strong Greek interest due to the presence of many upcoming businesses with Greek founders and executives. Their successes make us all happy but the fact that they are done mainly in «foreign» It reminds us that our country continues to «kicks out» her hopes abroad.
Modern Panathenias are not as well known as those of antiquity. Nevertheless, it is a very important institution that gives us the opportunity to understand how important our country's human scientific and business potential is. This year's three-day festival, which ends today, hosted businesses, entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers and investors from the field of startup companies and from many parts of the world.
They all have the opportunity to present their ideas, achievements and plans and seek partners who will believe in them, either to work together or to invest in their vision. At the same time, they have the opportunity to present themselves to the general public and become known elsewhere beyond the narrow business. The presence of hundreds of startups, many of which are directly related to Greece but not necessarily active here, shows how important the festival is at international level.
At the same time, however, it gives us the understanding that very important efforts with a strong Greek color are choosing its way «foreign» as it is not so easy to realize their ambitions in their homeland. The examples of Runway AI and Reflection AI are typical of the potential of the new Greeks and the inability of our country to keep them here. Both of these companies are active in the field of Artificial Intelligence, as is their name and as is expected at this time.
Runway AI, founded in 2018 by a group of three partners of which Anastasias Germanidis is also a member, specializes in the use of Artificial Intelligence models in the field of video creation. He has already been present in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, London, Tel Aviv and Tokyo and has already attracted many major investors from the Venture Capital site. During its last round of funding, which took place last February, the company raised $315 million and its valuation based on this funding is estimated at $5.3 billion according to Bloomberg TechCrunch. For its part, Reflection AI is one of the startups that hunt Superintelligence, as we can see on the Sequoia Capital website, one of the global giants of Venture Capital.
Ioannis Antonoglou is one of the two founders of the company, to which he referred on the 26th May Washington Post article, on the occasion of the «descent» the company in the US capital in order to promote its products that it itself believes can play an important role in improving US national security. In the above article we also saw that the value of the business based on its latest funding is estimated at around $25 billion.
Based on the experience of recent years, we will not be surprised if these two companies pass after a few months or years the Wall Street threshold, making their Greek co-founders the new members of the multi-millionaire club that started from a startup. This will make us very happy, but it will sadden us at the same time because it will remind us once again that it is still not possible to grow dynamically of this type of startup if they have their basis in Greece, even if their creators are Greeks. This means that their success does not have such a positive impact on Greece despite the very positive publicity it causes. How could this be changed is not easy to say, as it is an issue that concerns other European countries, bigger than ours.
It is known that Europe and Greece, with it and Greece, actually force many businesses to move to the US, as they see that there the prospects for growth are better for them, not only because of the size of the American market but also because of the different way things work in very many areas. Can we copy some of the American practices in order to reduce this wave of business migration? This is an interesting question that unfortunately we cannot answer.
