Two successful young Greeks have created a Dubai-based company, ENTNT, which finds scientists from India and staffs them with companies in the Western world.
Omiros Papakonstantinou graduated from Athens College and did his Master’s at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. For five years, he worked as a lawyer in a large law firm in London. Since 2016, he has been the founder and Partner of the Multi-Family Office in London, which is involved in commercial real estate investments in the UK and Private Equity, investing in start-ups as well as established companies.
Konstantinos Lyras, on the other hand, was born in England but raised in Greece and studied History in Italy and America. He has worked in the shipping and IT sectors. His career path took him to India, where he worked for a company that developed shipping software.
“During the coronavirus pandemic, I noticed not only the speed with which the company’s office in India was moved to remote operation but also the surplus of talent in the region. The combination of these two factors – the effectiveness of the remote working model and the contrast between the abundance of talent in India and the shortage in Greece – inspired the idea for the creation of the company ENTNT,” Omiros said.
Omiros and Konstantinos have known each other since their student days. When they met again in 2018, they decided to join forces and establish a pioneering company for Greece.
“My first personal contact with India was in 2018 when I visited my friend and classmate Konstantinos Lyras, who lived there and ran the family office in India (maritime software with Indian developers supporting the Greek office in Piraeus),” he continued.
“Seeing the huge Indian market as an emerging global superpower, we jointly decided that we wanted to gain a presence and invest in India and started looking for opportunities.”
Omiros recounts their success story: “Due to Konstantinos’ previous experience looking for programmers in India, we knew we would face the following problem. Most companies looking for people in India were turning to Indian subcontractors, resulting in mediocre quality, high prices, and generally a not-so-good experience for customers!”
He and Konstantinos admit to Lemon Social Eye, “To get around this, we decided that we needed to build a platform that would help us hire people ourselves. Additionally, we wanted to highlight the Greek element in our company, knowing that this would give us a great advantage.
“We believed that the harmonious combination, we call it Smart Shoring, of offshore talent with Greek professionals in the industry, such as programmers, project managers, product managers, etc., would generate innovative ideas and great efficiency.
“That’s when Chief Technology Officer Marios Sarrigiannis, who came to us after leaving Microsoft, joined our team to help us build our platform.”
“In the first job we posted looking for programmers in India, we were shocked when we found out that within a week, we received over 14,000 applications! Our clients in Greece with huge software companies receive 400 applications for the same positions!
“Of course, it was impossible to read so many resumes, so we decided to integrate various AI tools into our platform that, combined with some automated evaluation processes, helped us filter the resumes and candidates.
“Result? We manage to interview less than 1% of candidates, thus being able to select the best ones!
“Due to Konstantinos’ contacts and studies in New York and my own experience in London, as well as my knowledge of the English language, we began offering services and human resources for accounting, programming and help desk centres of shipping companies to some large hotels in New York, but also to various tech start-ups in London.

“As Greeks abroad, of course, always in the back of our minds was how we would bring all that we had created to Greece, where language was a barrier. Due to Konstantinos’ family’s involvement in shipping and my contacts from London, we already knew that in the shipping industry, a lot of work and communication is done in English, the same as in the software industry.
“Especially in shipping, we identified that there is a huge shortage of engineers, who are needed for various office roles and can be done remotely, and in combination with programmers, we started with these two services.
“So, since 2022 and after we created a team in Greece with extensive experience in the shipping and software sectors, we officially started sales in the Greek market. As we expected, we initially faced some hesitation since, for the reasons I mentioned above, many of our clients had had a bad experience with India.
“However, we soon managed to convince them to give us a chance, and we are now working with some of the largest shipping and software companies, insurance companies and start-ups in Greece.”
The company is headquartered in Dubai, and its growth potential is huge as India holds a comparative advantage. It has a population of over 800 million people under the age of 30.
And the most amazing thing is that India is estimated to have around 10 million higher education graduates per year!
Article by Maria Lemonia for New Money. Translated by Paul Antonopoulos.
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