The ten years anniverary of the AbZorba Games acquisition by Greentube

This Sunday, February 23rd 2025, marks the 10th anniversary of the AbZorba Games acquisition by Greentube, member of the NOVOMATIC group.

I’d like to very warmly thank Manos Moschous, my co-founder at CTO at AbZorba Games, as well as our CEO, Andrew Hughes.

That milestone was achieved at a moment when Greece was facing the Grexit scenario, which was thankfully avoided. We were, then, intentionally making a pun with our own ‘Grexit’ which, contrary to the other one, was indeed a resounding success.

What, finally, makes me happy and proud of this achievement is that ten years later, not only AbZorba Games still has operations in Athens but their headcount has doubled, generating even more and higher quality employment for the country.

On Thursday March 27th we shall organize a Scale-up Greece meetup dedicated to this success, where Manos will be the keynote speaker and will share the learning of a journey which started around 2005 and still continues with great success!

A relevant anecdotal story is the following:

Exactly three years before that exit, on February 23rd, 2012, Paulo Andrez was giving a keynote address in Athens, in what was envisioned to be the inaugural event of the “Hellenic Angels”, the angel group of the then newly formed Hellenic Startup Association — a vision realized also in 2015 along with Prof. Panagiotis Ketikidis and Andreas Baresel-Bofinger, leading to the now thriving HeBAN — Hellenic Business Angels Network.

That exact day, on the 23rd of February 2012, a UK-based business angel, our dear friend Lawrence, was making the first our of three rounds of a significant (change-making, I could call it) angel investment in AbZorba Games.

Our bank manager was kinda shocked, as back to the day, there were numerous wire transfer taking funds out of Greece, but, very few (if any), bringing money to the country.

For All of us back then, that was a moment of realization that if entrepreneurship really develops at scale in our small country (something which still remains an objective), many of our economy’s problems will have been effectively addressed.

This story also underlines that angel investors are pretty much the only ones out there who can act in such a situation — no matter how good AbZorba Games was, no international tech fund would invest in Greece in 2012.