"33East is now €35 million in size. In January 2026, we completed our second closing, matching our original target and we're excited to share what we've been building," the Cyprus-focused venture capital firm has said a year after being established.
In the first edition of an online newsletter on the firm's activities, its founders, Demetrios Zoppos and Yiannis Eftychiou, continued, "We are proud to be the first institutional VC fund focused on Cyprus. We think sharing what's happening on the ground is part of the job, so that the wider ecosystem, and those watching from outside it, can see what Cyprus is capable of."
"Getting here took the conviction of a small group of people who believed Cyprus could be a producer of technology, not just a market for it. We're grateful to our investors: Cyprus Equity Fund and EIF, the Bank of Cyprus, the Leventis & David families as well as our individual backers," Zoppos and Eftychiou continued.
The founders went on to point out that they operate one fund with two strategies, "One for the earliest spark of an idea. One for founders ready to scale."
"Our Acceleration Compartment (€8 million) is where we meet founders the earliest. Tickets under €300k, with plans to back up to 25 companies over the next three to four years. The best of these will graduate into the Venture Compartment as they grow," they continue, adding that, "Our Venture Compartment (€27 million) backs pre-seed and seed-stage companies with first tickets of up to €1M. We aim to invest in up to 15 companies, leading or co-investing alongside other VCs, with capital reserved to follow on into our strongest performers."
As Zoppos and Eftychiou point out, "The two compartments are designed to work together. Acceleration tickets let us build a relationship with a founder for twelve to eighteen months before writing a Venture-scale cheque."
The founders also listed some of the firm's portfolio highlights, including Electryone AI - OS for energy flexibility, the first software-only platform built for the new generation of energy market participants - and now authorised to trade across GB electricity markets.
Another portfolio highlight is FitWise AI - computer vision for sports analytics, the "ElevenLabs for video" - high-precision 3D motion capture from a single phone camera.
Squid - AI grid planning for utilities, AI-powered software for the engineers building the grid the energy transition depends on was another portfolio highlight.
Sharing what they learned in the first year, Zoppos and Eftychiou said, "Be the first call- Competition for the best deals is real. Brand, relationships, and community win allocation. Year one was about earning the right to be called first. Meet founders where they are- The ecosystem is very nascent. We expanded the Acceleration Compartment to €8m so we can spend real time with founders before writing larger cheques. Saying no to good people is the hardest part - We met talented founders building reasonable businesses that simply aren't venture-scale. Passing on people you like, who are doing nothing wrong, has been the most uncomfortable discipline of year one."
The founders also noted that 2025 had seen 33East travel extensively, "From Nicosia to London, 2025 took us across Cyprus, the UK, and Europe. We met founders and deepened relationships in the ecosystem we're here to build" with more planned for this year including bringing the 33East community together in Cyprus and Greece this month.
In their parting thoughts, the two founders said, "This is our first rodeo together as 33East, but it is not our first rodeo. Between us we bring twenty-five years of building companies and investing across early stage. We have lived through PC, internet, mobile and cloud, and we recognise when something is genuinely structural. AI is structural.But structural doesn't mean easy to back. Two filters guide where we look."
They revealed that, "The first is B2B. Consumer AI is a brutally hard place to build durable value. The foundational models own distribution, and most products on top of them are a feature waiting to be absorbed. The real opportunity is in enterprise: where AI re-architects workflows, automates work that previously needed humans, and compresses decisions from weeks to hours.The second is sectors with natural moats. The places vibe-coded apps and the foundational models can't easily reach. That tends to mean conservative or regulated industries — energy, financial services, healthcare, industrial software — where domain expertise, certification, integration depth, and trust are real barriers. Slower to build. Slower to be displaced."
As Demetrios Zoppos and Yiannis Eftychiou concluded, "The observation we keep returning to is this: intelligence is becoming cheap, but wisdom will remain scarce. Knowing which problems matter, which businesses deserve to exist, which founders to back. None of that gets commoditised. We are more optimistic about technology than we have been in years. We are also more selective than we have ever been. Thank you for building this vision of Cyprus with us."
