The plot looked possible. The answers did not. Antonis Markopoulos wanted land in southern Attica where he might build a holiday home for his children. He had money to spend, listings to browse and two questions that seemed almost embarrassingly basic: Is it buildable? How many square metres can go on it? The replies from agents were fog where facts ought to have been. So he drove. Anavyssos, Lagonisi, somewhere else, then somewhere else again. The kilometres accumulated; certainty did not.
This was around 2018 or 2019, and Markopoulos was hardly a stranger to complicated systems. He had studied information technology and communications at the University of Athens, earned a doctorate at the National Technical University of Athens and spent years in technology businesses across several continents. Yet the purchase of a single piece of earth appeared to depend on a roaming committee of agents, engineers, lawyers and planning records, all loosely connected by telephone.
Real estate had managed a peculiar trick. It made a willing buyer feel like an unpaid project manager. Markopoulos's irritation became a design brief.
An engineer notices the handoffs
Markopoulos was born and raised in Athens, with family roots in Gortynia in Arcadia. His academic work belonged to the age when mobile networks were learning to move gracefully. His papers examined subjects such as handover algorithms, location information, wireless security and network performance. A network, after all, is judged not merely by its nodes but by what happens between them. Calls must pass from one cell to another without collapsing. Information must arrive intact. A failure at the seam is still a failure.
Property transactions have seams everywhere. A listing hands off to a viewing; the viewing to an offer; the offer to legal and technical checks; the checks to finance, signatures and transfer. Each specialist may do a fine job while the buyer remains lost in the corridor. Markopoulos did not enter real estate as a lifelong broker. He entered as someone trained to suspect the corridor.
His first entrepreneurial experiment came much earlier. After finishing his doctorate, he used wireless sensor networks to automate processes for fish hatcheries. One aquaculture company had lost roughly three months of production after human error and asked for a fuller system. Today the work would wear the fashionable label “IoT.” At the time it was simply a practical use of sensors, software and a problem expensive enough to deserve attention. The activity succeeded but did not continue. The instinct did.
Observe a costly manual failure. Map the information that goes missing. Build a system around the handoffs. The sector changes; the method remains recognisable.
The public and private education
Markopoulos's career then widened beyond engineering. He worked at technology companies including Velti and moved through senior multinational roles. At Intralot he held responsibility across Asia-Pacific from Melbourne, later taking on Europe and Africa. Conference biographies describe him overseeing ten subsidiaries and more than 300 employees across Oceania and Asia. Operating at that scale teaches a less romantic form of technology: budgets, sales, government relationships, local rules and the daily necessity of getting different people to pull in approximately the same direction.
There was also a turn through government. From 2010 to 2012, as Greece's Special Secretary for Digital Planning, he worked on the country's digital agenda and the early JEREMIE technology funds launched with the European Investment Fund. The role placed him near both the machinery of public programmes and the young companies meant to benefit from them. It is unusual founder preparation: part engineer, part operator, part policy mechanic.
He has described ethics and humanity as the qualities that matter most in an entrepreneurial outlier. It is a revealing answer from a career containing so much machinery. Systems, in his telling, are still for people. The point of digitising a transaction is not to make a splendid dashboard. It is to return time, visibility and agency to whoever is stuck inside the process.
A co-founder between sets
Prosperty's creation has the pleasing untidiness of a real origin story. Markopoulos met Antonis Despotakis at a gym. They exercised at the same time, talked about work and the world, and eventually Markopoulos asked what Despotakis built. Examples arrived. A coffee followed on Kifisias Avenue. Markopoulos had two business ideas in mind after leaving a multinational role, and property was one of them.
He sketched a platform with digital appointments, online offers and electronic signatures. Despotakis and colleagues produced a proof of concept in about a month so it could be shown to people in the market. Feedback turned the sketch into a commitment. Four people rented a 35-square-metre office and housed the first version of the platform there. Nikos Patsogiannis joined Markopoulos and Despotakis as the third co-founder. The company formally dates its founding to 2020.
The consumer proposition was broader than a prettier property portal. Prosperty wanted to package the unruly journey: professional presentation, verified information, appointments, offers, legal and technical review, documentation and support through the transfer. For sellers, market data could challenge an optimistic asking price before months were wasted. For buyers, better information could turn twenty speculative visits into three plausible ones.
The listing is only the front door
As Prosperty grew, the company developed a second face. Its B2B software helps banks, servicers, asset managers, property managers, developers and other institutions manage and commercialise portfolios. The same basic complaint reappears at a larger scale: scattered data, manual workflows, slow reporting and weak visibility. A person may struggle to understand one property. An institution can struggle to understand thousands.
By 2025 the company said its consumer platforms drew more than 800,000 monthly visitors and carried more than 12,000 active listings. It operated across several Greek cities and Cyprus, with more than 100 specialised employees. Those are company-reported figures, useful less as ornaments than as evidence of the two-sided machine Markopoulos and his colleagues had assembled: services for individual transactions and software for portfolios.
The strategy also moved toward finance. Prosperty built an online mortgage pre-approval platform, attempting to remove branch visits from another stubbornly physical part of buying a home. In April 2025 it announced a €5.5 million Series A led by Eurobank. The bank acquired a 25 per cent stake in Prosperty RE Ltd and began promoting an initial 800 bank-owned properties through the platform, with a stated goal of at least 2,000 by year-end.
Capital brings its own paperwork, naturally, but it also changes the question. Prosperty no longer needs merely to prove that Greek property transactions contain friction. It needs to show that its combination of software, data and human services travels across markets whose regulations and professional customs differ. Markopoulos has spoken about expansion in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. Adaptability, not just ambition, will decide how far the system goes.
The useful theft
There is a lesson here for founders who are surrounded by problems and still cannot find an idea. Look for the moment when the customer becomes the connective tissue. Markopoulos was not merely hunting for land. He was carrying questions between professionals, reconciling incomplete information and scheduling the next dependency. The market had outsourced its coordination to him without asking.
Prosperty's wager is that coordination can become a product. Some of it can be automated; some displayed; some standardised; some still requires a capable person on the telephone. The hybrid quality is important. A property transfer is not a food delivery. Stakes are high, documents have consequences and local expertise retains its value. Software can illuminate the route without pretending the route is simple.
Markopoulos's own route has been similarly hybrid. Research taught him to inspect systems. Government taught him how policy and funding shape adoption. Multinational management taught him operations across borders. A fruitless drive around the Attica coast supplied the customer grievance. A gym supplied a co-founder. None of these ingredients alone explains Prosperty. Their handoffs do.
He once set out to answer whether a plot could hold a house. The larger project now asks whether a property market can hold a coherent transaction. It is a less picturesque question than sea views in Lagonisi. It may also save everyone a great deal of driving.