Known as the ‘Jewel of the Mediterranean’ and the legendary birthplace of Aphrodite, the ancient goddess of love and beauty, Cyprus is also an emerging startup ecosystem in the crossroads of Europe, Middle East and Africa. With a small but thriving and buzzing supportive ecosystem, Cyprus is committed to drive its growth through innovation and entrepreneurship. As such, it offers aspiring entrepreneurs funding, support and mentoring opportunities to turn their dreams and ideas into reality.
Here are 10 local startups which have already profited from this environment. As with all of our lists, all of these startups were founded in the last few years, with fast-growing teams, are developing innovative solutions, and who are working on or recently closed funding rounds to continue thriving in 2021 and beyond.
AdOperator – Push Ads have taken the affiliate marketing industry by storm and AdOperator is changing the advertising experience for the online users and advertisers with its platform. Founded in 2017, AdOperator’s self-service platform enables advertisers to purchase Web Push Traffic from any geo, helping them increase brand awareness of our clients, reduce their advertising costs and attract a new audience. AdOperator’s platform gets 3 billion impressions and 4 million clicks daily, 1.9k active ad campaigns every day and 900 happy clients every day.
Block.co – Nowadays, it is essential to move all processes into a digital format and develop a strategy to accommodate the digital environment into all products and processes. Founded in 2018, the University of Nicosia spin-off, Block.co, is facilitating this process in the field of digital certificates. Their digital certificate platform enables organizations to securely issue certificates by leveraging Blockchain technology, thus making them tamper-proof and instantly and independently verifiable.
DXone – Launched in 2020, DXone is the next-generation crypto intelligence and trading platform, the one-stop-shop for crypto traders and investors. In addition to a proprietary digital asset exchange, the platforms offer its customers a comprehensive range of trading features, real-time data, editorial content and analysis tools for information. In 2020 the startup raised €3.3 million during the private sale portion of its DX1S security token offering.
BridgerPay – BridgerPay offers AI-powered, multiple-payment-provider platform businesses and merchants. The payment-as-a-service (PaaS) company was founded in 2018 to make payments easy for online merchants all over the world, by allowing businesses to unite transactions and data across hundreds of payment providers from any country or risk group into one cashier app. With more than 250 payment providers integrated, Bridgerpay is here to optimize your growing business payment needs.
Decentralized Vision – Decentralized Vision is the blockchain-based FinTech company that developed the PumaPay PullPayment Protocol. Decentralised Vision utilizes the emerging technology of the blockchain to allow both merchants and their customers to participate in decentralized e-commerce and directly interact with each other. Currently, they offer 4 products: Business Console, PumaPay pride, Fiat Settlement Layer and Feature Rich Cryptocurrency Wallet. The company was incorporated in 2017 and is currently headquartered in Limassol, Cyprus.
Simple – Intermittent fasting is a ‘trending’ health strategy, and Simple app is here to help its users stick to it. The Simple fasting and meal tracker app (founded in 2019) helps users to keep track of their eating habits, get personalized insights about their health, and make their daily fasting routine better. Furthermore, users can share their progress with their friends anytime and motivate them to join the fasting path towards the new healthy lifestyle.
Yous – Limassol-based Yous is an AI-based translator for calls. Founded in 2019, uses AI and telecom technologies to recognize telephone speech, convert the spoken language into the listener’s language, thus enabling the listener and the speaker to understand each other. Financially backed by an angel round in 2019, Yous supports translation in 16 languages and is estimated to make telephone interpreting 8 times cheaper and 30 times faster than human interpreting.
Flexfin – Flexfin (founded in 2018) is offering financing and cash flow management services to small and medium-sized enterprises in Greece and Cyprus via a modern and user-friendly platform. Being one of the only licensed factoring companies in Greece, the fintech startup offers factoring services to companies in urgent need of liquidity and discounts their invoices and checks easily, quickly and electronically. Backed by €9.2 million in funding, Flexfin is changing the way small businesses think about their receivables.
BuzzGuru – Influencer marketing is the fastest-growing customer acquisition marketing method. So, if you are thinking of using it for your business, reach out to BuzzGuru, a platform for searching and selecting influencers, analyzing competitors and successfully conducting advertising campaigns. So far, the company (founded in 2017) has launched over 10,000 ad campaigns, for over 100 customers and is releasing more than 1000 ad videos monthly. BuzzGuru currently operates in more than 60 countries and is constantly increasing the base of influencers and new markets, having landed around €1 million in funding.
L2P limited – Video games can be great for bonding with friends. But lately video games tournaments are becoming more popular, sometimes coming with a big monetary prize. So, what if there was someone who could teach you how to play video games at a level where you can win these prizes? The educational platform, Learn2Play, promises to do that with the popular games Dota2, League of Legends, Overwatch, and Hearthstone. The platform (founded in 2017) has over 1 million users in 50+ countries and has analyzed 196, 923,258 matches and counting. The startup has raised around €4.2 million in total.
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