Quest is a Group of companies in the sectors of Information Technology, Parcel Delivery Services and Renewable Energy and the geographies of Europe and Middle East, being headquartered in Athens, Greece.
The Holding Company which was founded in 1981 and is listed in the ASE since 1998 has a long history in investments, mergers and acquisitions and also some very successful exits.
Almost three years ago we identified the beginning of a very promising movement of “digital economy” startups being founded in Greece. The movement was fueled partly by the global entrepreneurial trend and partly by the hard local economic conditions that pushed talented individuals to follow alternative self driven career paths.
Driven by an appetite to further explore the possibilities of the movement and to support the newly born entrepreneurial ecosystem we decided to take action and as a result IQbility was born.
IQbility is a corporate business incubator offering angel funding, high quality mentorship, business networks and supporting services to high potential startups.
Every year invest in a few companies (typically 2-4) an amount of 2500k euros in the following two stages:
- Pre-seed , which is how we name the stage where a company already has a working prototype and seeks for early market validation and traction.
- Seed, when there is product and initial traction and the company tries to prove it can scale
In both cases we prefer to co-invest with other relevant angel investors or funds, whereas at the same time we leverage our organization’s resources to assist and create synergies.
Until today we have hosted 8 companies and invested in 6. Almost all of them have raised next rounds of financing and most of them are doing pretty well in terms of revenues and growth.
The main conclusions we have drawn from the IQbility experience can be summed up as follows:
- Yes, there are teams of very skilled and talented people in Greece that can dream, innovate and execute business models which turn out to be competitive on the global arena.
- We believe that although the local ecosystem is still very young and relatively small it has reached enough mass to be able to reproduce itself and continue to grow. However if we want to accelerate its growth we should see more private initiatives taking place and more money invested in.
- Yes, local and regional corporates can benefit from synergies with startups under the condition that they are open minded, patient, generous and have their upper management really engaged in this.
Alexandros Roustas
Managing Director
IQbility
IQbility has recently launched 2016’s call for proposals by the deadline of MAY 23. In case you are interested you may submit your proposal here.