#CatalyticDeepTech #1: Founder Match

Science is the foundation,
business is the bridge

How we opened our meetup series: a founder-matching evening in Agia Paraskevi, co-hosted with Panathēnea.

Most deep tech companies don't stall because the science fails. They stall in the stretch between a result in the lab and a product someone will pay for: the Valley of Death. Often the missing piece isn't more capital or a better prototype. It's the other half of the founding team.

That's the problem we built the first #CatalyticDeepTech around. On 21 April, together with Panathēnea, we opened the doors of Accepted Coworking in Agia Paraskevi to two groups that rarely end up in the same room. On one side, the Technical Architects: the PhDs, engineers and researchers who hold the IP. On the other, the Commercial Accelerators: the go-to-market strategists and operators who know how to turn it into a business.

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Two sides of the same partnership

To frame the evening, we asked two people who live this dynamic from opposite ends to sit down for a fireside chat.

Theo Mastrokostopoulos, our Venture Partner, is a commercial executive with two medtech exits behind him. He knows what a young medtech company needs from its commercial leadership, and what happens when it doesn't get it.

Dimitris Iakovakis, co-founder and CTO of Koios Care, comes from the other side. He turned his PhD research into a company whose AI platform passively tracks Parkinson's progression using everyday smartphones and smartwatches.

Between them, they covered the unfiltered reality of building deep tech from the inside out.

Then, the matching

After the talk, the room took over: open founder matching, with technical and commercial people seeking each other out, which is exactly what the evening was designed for.

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Why this matters to us

We invest at the first institutional round in science- and engineering-led companies. Many of the most promising teams at that stage start research-first: strong on IP, still looking for the person who will take it to market. Founder Match was our first attempt to make those introductions happen on purpose rather than by luck.

It also set the pattern for everything that followed: a focused technical topic, people who have lived it speaking first, then an open conversation with the room.