Emilios Markou

Emilios Markou is the co-founder and Executive Director of Hellas Direct, a digital-first ("direct") motor and general insurance company operating across Cyprus, Greece and Romania. He founded the company in 2010–2011 alongside Alexis Pantazis, building it into one of Southeast Europe's most prominent insurtechs — over 900,000 customers, roughly $87.5M in capital raised, and four consecutive appearances on the Financial Times FT 1000 list of Europe's fastest-growing companies. Hellas Direct was selected into the Endeavor global entrepreneurship network in 2012, and Markou is recognized as an Endeavor Global Entrepreneur.

Before founding Hellas Direct, Markou built a career in financial services. He was a Director in the European Financial Institutions structuring team at Barclays Capital, and prior to that an Executive Director in the Investment Banking Division at Goldman Sachs, where he led projects within the firm's European insurance practice. He began his career as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company, advising European, US and Asian clients across insurance, banking, energy and transportation.

Academically, Markou holds a BSc in Computer Science, an MSc in Actuarial Science, and a Masters in Finance from London Business School. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries (FIA) in the United Kingdom — an unusually deep actuarial and quantitative background for a founder-operator. In 2022 he and co-founder Alexis Pantazis were named EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™ Cyprus.

Alongside his operating role, Markou invests personally as an angel, typically deploying capital into early-stage rounds and often co-investing with his Hellas Direct co-founder Alexis Pantazis. His investing reflects his operator's lens — a bias toward technology-enabled financial services, insurance-adjacent, and B2B/marketplace software businesses, concentrated in the Greek and German startup ecosystems.

• Invests at pre-seed and seed stage as an angel, in a personal capacity rather than through a fund.
• Strong tilt toward insurtech, fintech, and B2B/application software — sectors adjacent to his own operating experience at Hellas Direct.
• Geographic focus on Greece and Germany, part of a broader Southern/Central European early-stage remit.
• Frequently co-invests with Alexis Pantazis (Hellas Direct co-founder), backing founders alongside institutional leads such as Project A Ventures.
• As an operator who scaled a regulated, capital-intensive insurance business, he values founders who pair strong technology with a credible path through complex, incumbent-heavy markets — mirroring Hellas Direct's own "disrupt a legacy industry with digital + actuarial rigor" playbook.