Some of the best business ideas begin with a problem that simply refuses to go away. Andreas Ttofi, Founder and CEO of Nepheli, speaks to CBN about the problem that kept appearing in different forms, across different companies, week after week.
Nepheli began life in cloud consulting, helping enterprises architect, migrate and manage complex cloud environments. Working closely with businesses, particularly forex and fintech companies in Limassol, provided a front-row seat to what was really happening behind all those dashboards.
“We spent years running cloud infrastructure for other people, and the job was the same every week,” Ttofi says. There were “cost spikes nobody noticed until the invoice”, security tickets that could have resolved themselves and auditors repeatedly asking teams to produce screenshots. In short, brilliant engineers were spending valuable hours switching between tools, chasing alerts and manually compiling information.
The company started as a consultancy, but when clients arrived with essentially the same frustrations, it became clear that another service was not the answer. “Eventually we stopped pretending it was a services problem.” The result is Hermeez, Nepheli’s AI platform, which creates a live knowledge graph of a company’s cloud estate, regardless of the cloud provider, and uses specialised AI agents to work across areas including cost, security, compliance and performance. The ambition is deliberately bigger than adding yet another screen to an already crowded technology stack. “Not another dashboard,” he enthuses: “A brain.”
Nepheli has paying subscribers, has secured AWS and Google Cloud partner status and counts KPMG Cyprus as a strategic partner. Limassol, meanwhile, has played a particularly important role in that journey. Its advantage, Ttofi says, is simple: customers - and plenty of them within an unusually compact business community. Forex, fintech, shipping and professional services companies operate within the same small radius, many managing serious cloud workloads and, importantly, talking to one another. “Our first clients came from that cluster, their problems shaped the product, and their referrals brought the next ones,” he explains. The city is also a natural landing point for international partners and investors, making it a place where conversations can quickly turn into opportunities.
For all that commercial energy, however, Ttofi believes that Limassol has a strong business community, but not yet the start-up ecosystem to match it. Founders looking for fellow entrepreneurs, early-stage investors or simply somewhere to become visible can still find themselves largely on their own. “The money is here, and a great deal of it,” he says, but comparatively little is prepared to back a software company before its success is obvious. As a result, founders often head to Europe or the US to raise capital, only to return to Cyprus to build their teams.
