Alexander Gromov explains why Europe’s savings market remains fragmented, how PickTheBank gives customers access to licensed banks and higher savings rates without holding their money, and why Cyprus is the company’s immediate priority.
PickTheBank started in 2022 as a comparison platform for European savings products. Today, you have expanded into a platform where customers can also apply for and manage deposits with selected partner banks. What drove this evolution, and what have you learned about the needs of European savers?
PickTheBank began with a personal question: where should I keep my savings to earn a better return without unnecessary risk? In 2023, we launched a comparison platform covering rates from almost every retail bank in Europe. It quickly gained popularity, especially in Western Europe.
We learned comparison alone was not enough, particularly for us in Cyprus. Knowing a better rate exists abroad differs from being able to access it. Customers need a familiar language, effective onboarding and confidence their money goes directly to a licensed bank.
That is why, in 2025, with Lidion Bank in Malta, we expanded into customer onboarding and fixed-term deposit management. Today, thousands use PickTheBank to find, apply for and manage savings products.
The lesson is simple: people want competitive rates, convenience and local support. A European deposit should be as easy to open and manage as one at home.
Europe has a single market, but banking and savings remain highly fragmented across national borders. What are the biggest barriers preventing Europeans from accessing savings products in other EU countries, and how is PickTheBank trying to remove that friction?
Europe has a single banking market on paper, but savings remain largely national. Customers in Cyprus may never discover or access competitive banks in Germany, Italy, Malta or the Baltics, while banks face significant costs to localise products, onboarding, support, marketing and operations country by country.
This creates major differences in rates for similar euro deposits. Some European markets currently offer returns of up to 3.5 per cent in EUR, while many customers in Cyprus earn very little, allowing inflation to reduce their savings’ real value.
This fragmentation has a real cost. Average household deposit rates in Cyprus remain among the euro area’s lowest, while statistics indicate that the average Cypriot holds around €30,000 in banks. If €30,000 earns 0–1 per cent locally instead of 3.5 per cent, the annual difference is approximately €750–€1,050.
PickTheBank bridges this gap through a familiar localised interface, while helping partner banks reach new markets without rebuilding their customer-facing infrastructure.
Trust is critical when a fintech company is helping people make decisions about their savings. How does the PickTheBank model work in practice, particularly around regulation, customer funds, deposit protection, and relationships with partner banks? How do you convince customers to look beyond their traditional local bank?
First, customers choose PickTheBank to diversify their savings. Those with larger balances may not want everything in one institution. Since eligible deposits are generally protected up to €100,000 per depositor, per bank, accessing additional banks can reduce concentration risk and make better use of deposit protection.
Second, PickTheBank is a service partner to licensed banks, not a bank, and never holds customer funds. The partner bank provides the deposit, holds the contractual relationship and receives the money after approval. PickTheBank provides technology, onboarding, a localised interface and support, while the banking product, funds and deposit protection remain with the bank. This aligns with customers’ desire to keep savings with banks rather than a fintech that invests or reallocates them.
Third, thousands of customers have used PickTheBank, and millions of euros have been placed with partner banks, demonstrating demand for competitive rates, diversification, transparency and bank-held savings.
PickTheBank is headquartered in Limassol but is addressing a European market. What are your priorities for the next 12–24 months? Are you planning to add more partner banks, markets or financial products, and are there any new partnerships, investment plans or announcements you can share with us?
Our priorities are focused on two areas.
First, we see strong organic demand in Cyprus. Over the next 12 months, we plan to localise the product further and focus more of our marketing efforts here. PickTheBank started from a problem we experienced ourselves, and we are excited to bring more value and a broader range of savings options to customers in Cyprus.
Second, we are working on adding new partner banks. We hope that already this autumn Cypriot customers will be able to access a second partner bank through PickTheBank, giving them more choice, better diversification and access to a wider range of competitive deposit rates.
Our longer-term ambition remains European: one familiar platform, available in local languages, where customers can preserve and grow their savings with licensed banks across the EU.
About PickTheBank
PickTheBank is a European savings platform based in Cyprus. It helps customers compare savings products, apply for and manage partner bank fixed-term deposits through a localised digital interface.
PickTheBank acts as a service partner to licensed banks and never holds customer funds. Customers transfer funds directly to the relevant bank.
Lidion Bank plc is a credit institution registered in Malta and licensed by the Malta Financial Services Authority, or MFSA.
The bank combines traditional banking services with digital solutions, including financing, cash management, treasury operations and multi-currency services. Lidion Bank serves retail depositors with the support of PickTheBank.
In this interview, Redox One outlines its technology, progress towards commercial deployment and international ambitions. It also explains why Cyprus, home to its headquarters, could become an early market and demonstration base for wider regional adoption.
From development to deployment
Redox One was established in 2022 by Tharisa plc to develop iron-chromium redox flow battery technology for safe, sustainable and cost-effective energy storage.
Building on Tharisa’s expertise in chromium production, mining, metallurgy and chemical processing, the company was created to address one of the most significant challenges of the energy transition: storing renewable energy reliably at scale.
A key strength is our vertically integrated approach, spanning chromium resources, electrolyte production and complete energy storage systems. This provides greater control over quality, supply security, cost and long-term scalability.
One of our biggest challenges has been moving from technology development to fully integrated, real-world energy storage systems. Important milestones include the successful operation of demonstration systems at our European Technology Centre in Germany and the development of a 625 kWh demonstration system in China.
Our next focus is advancing larger demonstration projects and progressing towards commercial deployments that can support renewable energy growth worldwide.
Storage built for duration
Our iron-chromium redox flow battery technology is designed to transform intermittent renewable energy into dependable, dispatchable power. It complements lithium-ion batteries by addressing applications that require longer-duration storage, high utilisation rates and long operating lifetimes.
The technology uses abundant materials such as iron and chromium and is engineered for decades of operation with minimal capacity degradation.
Safety is a major advantage. The system uses a water-based, non-flammable electrolyte that eliminates the thermal runaway risks associated with conventional lithium-ion batteries.
Flow batteries also offer significant economic benefits for long-duration storage because power and energy capacity can be scaled independently. Extending storage duration primarily requires additional electrolyte and storage tanks rather than a complete battery system expansion.
From a sustainability perspective, the electrolyte can be reused and recycled, while the battery chemistry relies on widely available materials. Together, these attributes create a safe, sustainable and cost-effective solution for large-scale energy storage.
International growth
Our commercialisation strategy is international from the outset. We are advancing the technology through demonstration projects and strategic partnerships across Europe, China and South Africa, while engaging with utilities, industrial customers, renewable energy developers and technology partners.
Our immediate priority is to validate demonstration systems and use operational data to support larger commercial projects. We see strong opportunities in mining, industrial, utility-scale and renewable energy applications where long-duration storage can improve reliability, flexibility and asset utilisation.
Our connection to Tharisa provides access to critical raw materials and metallurgical expertise, enabling participation across the value chain, from electrolyte production to complete energy storage systems.
Cyprus could potentially play an important role as a gateway to Southern Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Over the next three to five years, our goal is to develop a growing portfolio of commercial installations and establish scalable manufacturing and supply-chain partnerships.
Cyprus as an early market
Cyprus is home to our headquarters and an important part of our long-term growth strategy. As an island electricity system with abundant solar resources, it faces many of the challenges that long-duration energy storage is designed to solve.
Our technology can store excess renewable electricity during periods of strong solar generation and deliver it when demand exceeds supply. This improves grid flexibility, reduces renewable energy curtailment, enhances energy security and helps lower reliance on imported fuels.
We believe Cyprus could become an important early market for sustainable energy storage and a valuable demonstration platform for wider deployment across Southern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean.
More broadly, Cyprus has the potential to strengthen its position as a regional deep-tech and clean-energy hub. Faster pathways for demonstration projects, targeted funding programmes and closer collaboration between government, industry, universities and investors would encourage more innovation-led companies to establish and expand their operations on the island.
Cyprus has the potential to become a regional innovation hub, but turning that ambition into globally successful companies will require startups to look beyond the domestic market, stronger corporate partnerships and easier access to international customers and investors.
In an exclusive interview with the Cyprus Mail, director at Plug and Play Cyprus, Filippos Kyprianou, discussed how the global innovation platform is connecting Cypriot founders with more than 600 corporations across over 60 locations, while helping them develop the commercial skills needed to scale internationally.
He also examined the role of local corporate partners, the challenges facing startups and what success should look like over the next five years.
Plug and Play has a global network spanning more than 60 locations. What does bringing that network to Cyprus mean in practical terms for a startup based on the island, and what can founders access through Plug and Play that they could not easily access before?
In practical terms it means a founder in Limassol is one introduction away from a decision-maker at a bank in Frankfurt or a shipping company in Singapore. Plug and Play works with more than 600 corporations across 60-plus locations, and those are not logos on a wall. They are relationships where the corporate has a team, a budget and a mandate to work with startups. Until now a Cypriot founder who wanted that kind of conversation had to get on a plane and hope.
The second thing is people. Every week of the programme we bring in mentors from across the network: operators who have scaled companies, investors, people who have run innovation inside large corporations. They would not normally be in Cyprus on a Tuesday morning, and our founders get time with them, one to one, on whatever is actually broken that week.
The third is capital. Plug and Play’s venture arm is one of the most active early-stage investors in the world. It hasn’t invested in Cyprus yet but our investment team sees every company that comes through the programme, and we want the first Cypriot startup in the portfolio to be the first of many.
None of it costs the founder anything. We take no equity, and the programme is covered through the Research and Innovation Foundation’s voucher scheme. And we are not here only for the ten companies in a cohort. The centre is a front door for the whole ecosystem. If you are a founder in Cyprus and need to reach a corporate or an investor in our network, come and talk to us.
The Cyprus centre has been developed through cooperation between Plug and Play, the government, the Research and Innovation Foundation and corporate partners. How important is that collaboration to building a sustainable ecosystem, what does it look like in practice, and where is there room to improve?
I’d say the collaboration isn’t something that helps the ecosystem, it is the ecosystem. When people look at Silicon Valley they see the startups, but what they’re really looking at is a loop that has been turning for seventy years, where Stanford produces the talent and the research, the funds on Sand Hill Road put money behind it, the corporates buy from the startups and eventually buy the startups themselves, and all of it sits on decades of government research spending that nobody remembers paying for. Each part feeds the next, and if you took any one of them out you’d be left with a pleasant university town.
In practice, collaboration means each party puts something real on the table and is accountable for it, and you can see that happening across the island, not only in our programme. The government sets the direction and removes the obstacles, through the grants RIF puts into early-stage companies, the spin-off framework that lets researchers leave a university with their own work, and the visa schemes that bring talent in. The corporates are starting to treat startups as suppliers and partners rather than as a sponsorship line. The universities are beginning to see a company coming out of a lab as a success rather than a loss.
Local funds and programmes are backing companies at the stage before they reach us, and we bring the international network, the programme and twenty years of knowing how this is done. Our piece of it is funded by RIF and co-funded by our partners, the targets are public, and we sit down with RIF regularly to look at the numbers together, so anyone can see whether it’s working.
That’s what collaboration looks like when it’s real: everyone has something at stake and nobody can hide behind the others.
Plug and Play’s core business worldwide is helping large companies work with startups. What would you say to a Cypriot company that wants to do more of that?
Most of the Cypriot companies I speak to already want to do this. What they ask is where to start, and my answer is usually smaller than they expect, and with different people in the room than they expect.
The way we do it with corporates around the world – and we’ve been doing it for twenty years with more than six hundred of them – is to start from a problem the business actually has rather than from a general wish to innovate.
A bank might want to cut the time it takes to onboard a business customer from weeks to days. A ship manager might want better data coming off its vessels. We take that problem, go through the startups we know, which at this point is tens of thousands, and bring back the handful that have already solved something similar for someone else.
The company meets them, picks one or two, and runs a pilot with us helping on both sides. The difficult part is rarely the technology, it is getting a company of eight people through the legal and security process of a company of eight thousand, and getting the company of eight thousand to make a decision in weeks rather than quarters.
If the pilot works there is a contract, and sometimes the corporate invests as well. That is more or less how a navigation startup ended up in every new Mercedes vehicle.
Where it goes wrong is when it is treated as an event instead of as work. If the innovation team organises a demo day and the head of operations isn’t there, nothing comes of it no matter how good the startups are, and if a pilot starts without anyone having agreed what happens when it succeeds, it will finish without anyone deciding.
I have watched this happen in Germany and in Singapore, so it is not a Cypriot problem, but it is the main reason companies try once and give up.
So my advice to a Cypriot company would be to pick one problem that someone in the business is already losing sleep over, give that person a modest budget and the authority to run a pilot and let us find the startups. Do one properly and the second is much easier. None of it needs an innovation lab.
Plug and Play works with major corporations around the world. How do you see Cyprus-based corporates such as Tototheo Global, ASBIS, ECOMMBX and Mastercard contributing to the development of local startups beyond simply providing sponsorship or support for programmes?
The funding is the smallest part of what they do. Each of the four came into this for reasons of its own, and the longer I work with them the more I think that mix is one of the programme’s strengths.
What each of them brings is quite different. Tototheo Global started out in maritime technology and has grown well beyond it over the years, but what matters most for our founders is that it is a company that built itself in Cyprus and then scaled into international markets, which is exactly the road the startups in our cohort are about to go down.
ASBIS is headquartered here and operates in dozens of countries, so it offers the kind of reach into other markets that a Cypriot startup could never buy on its own, and it is also one of the few corporates on the island that already invests in technology companies, which gives it a very practical interest in what comes out of the programme..
ECOMMBX built its payments infrastructure in Limassol and sells it internationally, so it knows from its own experience what a regulator will ask and what a bank’s due diligence actually looks like, and that is knowledge a fintech founder would otherwise spend a couple of painful years acquiring.
Mastercard brings the view of a global network that sees where payments are going before almost anyone else.
Some of them are here because they want startups working on problems inside their own business, some because they want to invest, and some because they believe the island needs this and would rather be part of it than watch from the side. What they have in common is that they all committed before there was a cohort or a single result to show them, when it would have been very easy to wait a year and see how it went. In my experience that kind of early commitment is the hardest thing to get from corporates anywhere in the world, and here we had it from the first day.
The first Plug and Play Cyprus cohort includes ten startups operating in areas ranging from artificial intelligence and diagnostics to energy and digital platforms. What were you looking for when selecting the first cohort, and what have you learned from working with these companies so far?
We kept the first cohort open to every sector on purpose, because when you start somewhere new you don’t know where the talent is, and the quickest way to find out is to open the door and see who walks in. We spent time with the finalists and picked ten.
At this stage you are backing people rather than plans, since the plan will change several times before it works, so what I look at is what a team has managed to do with almost no money, whether they can explain what has changed in the world that makes this possible now, and whether they have a real reason for the decisions they’ve made on price, market and hiring or are telling themselves a story. I also pay attention to what has moved between our first conversation and the second, because two weeks is usually enough to tell.
What has struck me so far is that the technical quality here is better than people outside Cyprus assume, and we have companies in diagnostics, energy and AI that I would put in any cohort in our network. Where they need us is on the commercial side, pricing for a market bigger than Cyprus, building a sales process that doesn’t stop when the founder is on a plane, and turning a pilot into a contract, which is what the three months are for.
Filippos Kyprianou
Cyprus has a growing technology community, but the domestic market is small. How important is internationalisation from the very beginning, and beyond funding, what are the biggest obstacles facing startups in Cyprus today?
It matters from before day one, from the moment you decide what to build. The question I ask every founder is: where do you want to be in five years? If the answer is Europe, build for Europe now. Price for it, hire for it, design for it and use Cyprus to test. You’ll hear me say this a lot. You’re not building a company for Cyprus. You’re building a company from Cyprus to serve global markets.
Estonia has about the same population as Cyprus and has produced around ten unicorns. It did that because nobody there could hide in a home market. A small market is only a problem if you let it set your ambition.
Beyond funding, the obstacles I see are distribution and ambition, in that order, and capital a long way behind. There’s more money looking at Cyprus than ever. What’s hard is the first international customer, the first salesperson who can close without the founder in the room, and being willing to fail in public. That last one matters more than people think. We have a culture, and it’s southern European more than Cypriot, where failure is something you hide. In Silicon Valley a founder who has failed once is easier to fund, not harder, because they learned something expensive and someone else paid for it. Part of what we’re here to do is bring that attitude with us.
Plug and Play has described Cyprus as having the potential to become an innovation hub in the Eastern Mediterranean. What would need to happen over the next five to ten years for that to translate into globally successful companies built from Cyprus, and how does Cyprus fit into the wider ecosystem?
The honest answer is that it needs a few Cypriot companies to make it internationally, because that is what sets everything else in motion. Once that happens, the people who built those companies go on to start new ones and invest in others, international investors begin to look at Cyprus seriously, and the next generation of founders can see that it is possible. Estonia is the clearest example: one exit, Skype, produced the founders and the capital behind most of the country’s startup scene today.
For that to happen here, a few things need to continue improving over the next five to ten years. Founders need to build for international markets from day one rather than for the island. Local corporates need to work with startups as a normal part of doing business, since a startup’s first serious customer is usually a local one. It must become easier to raise capital while keeping the company and the team in Cyprus, rather than relocating to raise. The island needs more experienced operators, people who have scaled companies before, which is what the government’s talent and visa schemes are designed to address. And universities need to see a company emerging from research as a success rather than a loss. None of this is new, and most of it is already moving. The next decade is about whether it compounds.
As for the region, Cyprus sits inside the EU, in a time zone that overlaps with Europe, the Middle East and India, and in a country small enough that you can reach anyone within a week, which makes it a natural meeting point. Reflect Festival already brings founders and investors from across the region to Limassol every May, and by bringing our network into it we want a founder from Athens or Dubai to be able to meet our corporates and our investors here, rather than having to fly to San Francisco to find them.
Looking beyond the first cohort and the November innovation Expo, what should success look like for Plug and Play Cyprus in three to five years, and what would convince you that the programme has made a lasting contribution to Cyprus’ startup ecosystem?
We have targets and we will be measured on them, and we take that seriously, but the targets describe the programme, not the ambition. What we want is for Cyprus to be a place where founders believe they can build something that matters and stay here while they do it, and we think that belief is the thing that is still missing. The talent is here and the money is coming. What hasn’t fully happened yet is the moment a few founders prove it can be done from here and everyone else stops asking whether it can.
In three to five years we would like to be able to point to Cypriot companies with customers in ten countries, with investors who came here to find them, with the first employees of those companies starting companies of their own. I would like a corporate in Limassol to have worked with enough startups that it does so without thinking, and a researcher at one of our universities to see starting a company as the obvious thing to do with a result, not a brave one. And we would like founders from abroad to consider Cyprus a serious place to build, not an unusual one.
The Expo on November 11 is the first time we put all of that in one room, our startups, our partners and investors from across the network, and I’m excited to see what comes out of it. As for what would convince me the contribution has lasted, it’s when the things we’ve described start happening on their own as well as through us, when the introductions we made in the first years have become relationships that no longer need us in the middle, and when Plug and Play has gone from being the reason a founder gets a meeting to being one of several good reasons to build a company from here. We’re in Cyprus for the long term.
Cyprus may still be an unlikely place to build a biotechnology company, but Dr Marianna Prokopi-Demetriades, co-founder and director of Theramir, is increasingly convinced that this is precisely what gives the island something to prove.
At Theramir, that means developing precision-oncology technologies, building the manufacturing and regulatory foundations needed to move experimental therapies closer to patients, and trying to show that globally relevant biotech can emerge from a small ecosystem.
The work is slow by design. Cancer therapies cannot be rushed through validation, safety testing, manufacturing or regulation, and even strong laboratory results can take years to reach the clinic.
For Prokopi-Demetriades, that reality sits alongside a much bigger ambition. She wants Theramir to help prove that Cyprus can do more than support innovation from elsewhere. It can create it, retain the intellectual property and take it international.
From a small island to global biotech
That ambition received fresh recognition this year when Prokopi-Demetriades was named the 2026 Study UK Alumni Awards global winner for Business and Innovation, selected among 1,800 candidates from 120 countries.
For years, she said, Cyprus “was not a place people immediately associated with biotechnology”, even though its technology and innovation ecosystem has grown enormously over the past decade.
Being recognised internationally therefore felt “both like a very personal milestone and a huge surprise”, but Prokopi-Demetriades also sees it as an opportunity to put Theramir and Cyprus more firmly on the global biotech map.
She is careful, however, not to confuse recognition with progress itself. “Of course, awards do not suddenly bring deals or open doors,” she said, noting that in biotech, progress still depends on years of scientific R&D, validation, manufacturing and regulatory work.
What recognition can do is bring visibility to a field that often feels like “a long and lonely path”.
Her hope is that the award brings more confidence and excitement around biotechnology in Cyprus, inspires the next generation of scientists and helps strong science find “a real path to scale and, ultimately, reach patients”.
What Theramir is trying to do differently
The science behind Theramir starts from a simple but difficult reality. Cancer does not behave in the same way from one patient to another.
Each tumour has its own molecular profile and can evolve under treatment, Prokopi-Demetriades explained, particularly in metastatic and treatment-resistant disease, where cancer can activate several pathways in order to survive.
Theramir’s EVmiR® platform is designed around that complexity.
“We use extracellular vesicles (the body’s natural cellular messengers) to deliver microRNAs, small molecules that can regulate multiple cancer-driving pathways simultaneously,” she said.
The distinction lies in how those molecules act. “Rather than blocking one target, the aim is to interfere with networks controlling tumour growth, resistance and metastatic spread,” she explained.
The company’s lead programme targets triple-negative breast cancer, with expansion into bladder and pancreatic cancer. Because EVmiR® is a platform technology, different microRNAs can be selected for different tumour biology, creating what Prokopi-Demetriades described as “a potentially adaptable precision-oncology approach”.
Could a blood test help tell us what comes next?
Theramir is also developing companion biomarker tools alongside its therapeutics, bringing diagnosis and treatment closer together.
The aim, Prokopi-Demetriades said, is “to connect treatment with the biomarkers that can tell us who is most likely to benefit and how the disease is responding”.
Today, Theramir evaluates LCP-1 expression through tissue biopsy, while liquid biopsy allows the team to study circulating microRNAs and tumour-associated extracellular vesicles in blood.
The value comes from combining those sources of information. “Together, these markers could support patient selection and provide a more dynamic picture of treatment response, with future potential for real-time monitoring and earlier detection of progression, resistance or recurrence,” she explained.
When the laboratory is only the beginning
A new challenge begins when promising science has to leave the laboratory.
“A promising laboratory result is only the beginning,” Prokopi-Demetriades said, because before a therapy can reach patients, the science must be reproduced consistently, safety and efficacy confirmed preclinically and the product transferred into GMP manufacturing with strict quality control and batch-to-batch consistency.
“This is why biotech development takes years rather than months,” she said.
Medochemie’s involvement is therefore significant. As she explained, “Medochemie’s involvement is important because it brings pharmaceutical manufacturing, quality and regulatory expertise directly into this next phase.”
For Theramir, the next major milestone is to translate EVmiR® into a clinical-grade product, establish a robust GMP manufacturing process and generate the data required to support first-in-human clinical development.
The expensive patience of biotech
That timetable also changes the way a biotech company has to think about investment.
Unlike a software startup, which can launch, test and change direction in months, biotech may spend years generating evidence before conventional revenues appear.
“Biotech investors are backing scientific progress long before conventional revenues appear, so milestones look very different: reproducible data, preclinical validation, GMP manufacturing, regulatory progress and eventually clinical development,” Prokopi-Demetriades said.
Public funding, she explained, helps de-risk the early science, while private investors “mainly place trust in the founders, the vision and the potential to create something with real patient impact”.
Strategic partners such as Medochemie then add sector expertise alongside capital.
There is, however, a limit to what money can accelerate. “Money can accelerate execution, but it cannot shortcut biology, safety or regulation” is how Prokopi-Demetriades put it, adding that this patience is part of “building biotech for the greater good”.
What could Cyprus become?
The question for Cyprus is whether individual companies such as Theramir can eventually become part of something broader.
Prokopi-Demetriades said the country has “come a long way since Theramir started”, when it was only the second company approved as an innovative company locally.
Her ambitions for the sector are focused. “Competing directly with mature biotech hubs is still unrealistic, but we can build our own niche,” she said.
Instead, she sees a real opportunity in next-generation biomanufacturing, developing specialised GMP capabilities that can take innovation from the laboratory towards the clinic.
Equally important is “creating and retaining Cyprus-made intellectual property”, then scaling it internationally through strategic partnerships and licensing.
That, she believes, would allow Cyprus “not simply to host innovation, but to originate and export it”.
When the science becomes personal
Behind the science, however, there is also a more personal contradiction.
Prokopi-Demetriades has spoken openly about losing people she loves to cancer while spending years working on therapies for the disease.
“There is a painful contradiction in spending years working on cancer therapies while, at the same time, losing people you love to the disease,” she said.
That experience creates an instinct to move faster.
“It makes you want to move faster, but it also reminds you why you cannot take shortcuts,” she said, adding that patients deserve “evidence and safety, not just promising science”.
Through the slower periods, she remains focused on why Theramir began. “The long timelines can be frustrating, but I know why we started,” she explained.
Reaching the first patient with a Theramir therapy would therefore mean far more than another development milestone.
It would be, she said, “a major scientific milestone and, for me, an intensely personal one”.
Just two months after launching i spy, Cypriot founder and CEO Nicole Georgiou is already seeing signs that the way people discover fashion online may be changing faster than the tools they use to shop it.
The London-based fashion-tech platform is built around a familiar problem. An outfit catches your eye on TikTok, Instagram or Pinterest, but finding the pieces behind it can mean screenshots, Google searches, several retailer tabs and saved posts scattered across different platforms.
Georgiou is trying to bring those steps together, allowing users to take inspiration from elsewhere, search for exact or similar items, save products into boards and return to them when they are ready to buy.
Early users show real purchase intent
For Georgiou, the clearest early sign that there is a genuine problem to solve has come from user behaviour, with early users showing that “people aren’t just coming to i spy for inspiration, they’re coming with real purchase intent”.
That interest has translated into activity. In the platform’s first two months, entirely through organic growth, “we’ve seen more than 20,000 searches and 800 user-created boards, alongside thousands of products being saved,” she said.
Those searches are also increasingly tied to genuine buying decisions, with users looking for “things they genuinely want to wear and potentially buy, wedding guest dresses, holiday outfits, bridal looks and pieces they’ve seen elsewhere”.
For Georgiou, however, repeat use matters more than the initial download. “What matters to me isn’t just that someone downloads i spy, but that they come back,” she said, adding that “A download tells you someone was curious. Coming back tells you you’ve created something they actually want to use.”
The same applies to how users save products. Georgiou said “a save means something different on i spy”, explaining that on a traditional inspiration platform it can simply mean “I like this”, while on i spy it can mean “I might actually buy this”.
That difference is reflected in the way users behave, she added, with people beginning to “search, compare, save and organise products they are genuinely considering”.
Fixing a fragmented shopping journey
Asked what problem i spy is actually solving for consumers, Georgiou pointed to the increasingly fragmented nature of online shopping, saying “The way we shop online has completely changed, but the infrastructure hasn’t caught up.”
A typical journey, she said, might involve seeing an outfit on TikTok, saving something on Instagram, finding inspiration on Pinterest, using Google to search for the product, opening multiple retailer tabs and taking screenshots on a phone.
The result is that “The inspiration, search, saving and purchasing parts of the journey are completely disconnected,” she said.
That is the gap i spy is trying to close. Georgiou put it simply when she said “i spy connects that journey”, allowing users to “take inspiration from anywhere, find the exact or similar products, save them, organise them and come back when you’re ready to buy”.
Building between inspiration and purchase
While visual search itself is not new, Georgiou sees i spy as occupying a different place from larger platforms.
She described Google Lens as “a strong image search tool” and Pinterest as “incredible for inspiration”, but said i spy is “specifically built around fashion and around what happens between seeing something you like and deciding to buy it”.
That space between discovery and purchase is central to the company’s proposition, with Georgiou describing it as “the consideration layer between inspiration and purchase”.
Taking on the bigger platforms
Asked what makes i spy defensible when Google, Pinterest and other large platforms could potentially build parts of it, Georgiou said there is “a structural reason why this space is still relatively unowned”.
In her view, large platforms face conflicting incentives. “Pinterest ultimately wants to keep you on Pinterest, while Google operates within its own ecosystem,” she said, while i spy is “deliberately cross-platform and consumer-first, if you discover something anywhere, you can bring it into i spy”.
Georgiou acknowledged that large platforms could technically build elements of the same experience, but said “creating a system that connects users across different platforms and retailers doesn’t naturally align with their existing business models”.
Focus is another part of the argument. “We’re also incredibly focused,” she said, contrasting i spy with platforms “building for hundreds of millions of people across many behaviours”.
By comparison, she said, “we’re building one thing for one specific behaviour: what happens between seeing something you want and deciding to buy it”.
That focus also feeds into the technology itself. Georgiou said “Our proprietary fashion technology and the behaviour we’re learning from searches, saves and interactions become increasingly valuable as the platform grows.”
Using AI to understand taste
When asked what AI can understand about a shopper that traditional search cannot, Georgiou said its value lies in reducing rather than expanding choice.
“I think AI is most useful when it reduces choice rather than simply giving you more of it,” she said.
The company is using technology to learn “someone’s real, underlying taste”, looking not just at what a person has searched for once, but at “the patterns across what they repeatedly search for, save, put into boards and eventually keep in their closet”.
Over time, Georgiou said, that allows i spy to understand “the person behind the search” and give users “better results, recommendations and discovery”.
She is also keen to distinguish that approach from the growing number of AI shopping agents. “We’re not trying to build another AI shopping agent that simply gives you a list of products,” she said, adding that “I want technology to understand someone’s taste while keeping the human and social side of fashion intact.”
Changing where shopping begins
Georgiou’s ambitions stretch beyond building another fashion app.
Asked what she means when she describes i spy as becoming “the default system for online shopping”, she linked that ambition to a change in where the shopping journey actually begins.
“When i spy becomes the default system for online shopping, it will be because we’ve changed where people think shopping starts,” she said.
That behaviour is already shifting, in her view, because “Shopping used to start with a search bar. Increasingly, it starts with a TikTok, an Instagram post, a creator, a Pinterest board or something you see in real life.”
For Georgiou, that is the space i spy wants to occupy, with the aim to “own the moment between seeing something you want and deciding to buy it”.
Fashion is where the company is starting because “it’s one of the most visual and fragmented categories”, although she believes “the underlying behaviour is much broader”.
Georgiou is also building the company from London as a Cypriot founder, saying the city has given her “access to fashion, technology talent, investors and brands”, while she still sees “a huge opportunity for Cyprus to support globally ambitious consumer technology companies”.
The company is now moving into fundraising after what she described as “strong interest from early investors”, with plans “to scale the technology, team and user growth”.
Ultimately, however, Georgiou’s measure of success is much simpler. She wants someone to see something they love and instinctively think “I’ll i spy that.”
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