The story of four
Cypriots, George Eracleous, Conno Christou, George Makkoulis, and
Panagiotis Papageorgiou, founders of
Avocarrot, as told by George Eracleous himself.
Military service is known as a period in men’s life where – in
harsh conditions - they can meet people who will be friends for life. Student
life is also known to bring youngsters closer through studying hard and
partying even harder. Conno Christou, George Makkoulis, George Eracleous, and
Panagiotis Papageorgiou, each one from a different district of Cyprus, met in
the army and totally by chance they continued their studies together at the
Imperial College of London majoring in computing.
The beginning
As George Eracleous revealed during an event organized by JCI
Nicosia titled ‘Business Success Stories – The real version’, their
entrepreneurial story began at a university hackathon. Their application
quickly gained a lot of users. At a certain time they decided they had to make
some money out of it; They decided to put some ads inside the app. Observing
the ads record, they noticed that users would not click on them so they decided
to build their one advertisement algorithm. Steadily they saw their revenue
rising. It was then they understood they had a good product in their hands –
which was not their original application - and Avocarrot was born in early
2013.
Avocarrot specializes in native ads for mobile applications, a
type of ad designed to blend into and mimic the look and feel of the rest of
the content on the app.
Their first big break
It was Google that gave these young men their first big break.
In Summer 2013, Google chose Avocarrot as one of the Top 8 best startups of the
world. Google gave them the opportunity to travel all the way to Silicon
Valley. As George noted, during his time at Silicon Valley he was ‘brain
washed’ to move their base from London to the ‘tech startup Mecca’. And so they
did. They all moved to Silicon Valley, living in a very small but highly
expensive apartment. Their efforts did not go a waste. After a year or two,
they eventually found a few investors from the USA, impressed by their idea and
team spirit, who gave them 2 million dollars.
Following that big investment, Avocarrot launched its native
ads exchange to the world and grew from a few hundred thousands of requests per
month to 10 billion per month. Also, the team grew significantly from 5 people
to 20.
Read more at DisruptCyprus.com.
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