We built a venture builder. Here's why.
Building companies that matter. From Athens.
A few months ago, we ran a program called Astylab Founders. The idea was simple: find people with moral ambition — ambitious enough to dream big, idealistic enough to care about the world, realistic enough to test small, humble enough to learn with others — and give them time, structure, and community to work seriously on a real problem.
136 people applied. We selected 8. They quit or paused their jobs. For 8 weeks they worked full-time, in person, in Athens, alongside a team of 5 venture builders. Not advisors who drop in for office hours. People in the room, every day, doing the work together.
By the end: 4 new ventures launched. Althyna, a service preventing elderly falls through home adaptations, secured €100k from Helidoni Foundation and is already serving its first users. Three more are live. Founder satisfaction: 9.75 out of 10.
That experience changed things for us.
Not just because the outcomes were strong. But because it made something very clear: the bottleneck in Greece is not ideas or ambition. It's the infrastructure to turn them into real companies. There's no shortage of people who see a problem and want to solve it. What's missing is a serious, hands-on layer between "someone should do something" and "we're building it."
That's why we created Idea Machines: a venture builder that works with founders and teams who care deeply about what they're building. We work in three ways: cohort programs that create new startups from scratch, one-on-one partnerships with founders we believe in, and sprint-based support for existing teams. Strategy, product, brand, go-to-market — always close to the work, never from a distance.
What's next
We’re building several things at once.
The first is Astylab Founders 2026, our flagship cohort program. 8 weeks, full-time, in person, in Athens, September to November. With the continued support of Helidoni Foundation and Stewards. Applications are open now. We’re looking for people, not ideas. You don’t need a startup or a team. You need to care about the world, talent and 8 weeks of full commitment. Deadline: May 31 → astylab.gr/founders
We’re also taking on our first projects: people and teams we’re genuinely excited to be involved in. If you’re building something and could use a team that works alongside you, not from a distance, reach out. → ideamachines.gr
We’re opening a physical space in Athens, a home for the work we do. A place to build alongside the founders and teams we support, run programs, and bring people together. More on that soon.
And this newsletter. We’ll be writing here about venture building, the companies we work with, and what we’re learning along the way.
If you know someone who should apply to Founders, send them this.
We made a short film about what happened inside the program. And we wrote the full case study — what worked, what was hard, and what it proved.