Dr. Dimitris Alexopoulos is the Commercial Director and co-founder of ITML, a 100+ staff technology company headquartered in Greece with offices in Limassol and Norwich, and a growing footprint across EU institutions and enterprise clients. An engineer by training — top-ranked university, software developer, then software architect — he leaped into entrepreneurship to help build something that could operate at the frontier of technology while delivering at enterprise grade. Outside the boardroom, he has been an educator and a sailor. Both disciplines taught him the same thing: the gap between good and great is almost always mental. We met with Dimitris and talked about ITML and his personal and professional journey. Here's what he told us. 

Tell us a bit about ITML— how did the idea come about, and what made you realize there was a market need for your solutions?

ITML's co-founders came from different professional roots: R&D and corporate delivery. What brought us together was a shared belief that the best results happen when innovation is not separated from real-world execution.

At the time, we could clearly see a gap in the market. Corporate delivery offered scale and reliability but lacked curiosity and room for innovation. Research produced strong ideas and technical depth, but too often stopped short of practical adoption and business impact. We founded ITML to connect these two worlds — to take the creativity of research, combine it with the discipline of commercial delivery, and turn ideas into solutions that create measurable value.

In 12 years, ITML grew from a startup into a team of 100+ people, delivering projects for EU institutions, public-sector organisations, regulated industries, and a growing private-sector client base in Greece and the UK. The market responded earlier than we expected. We do not aim to follow it as it is today — we aim to understand where it is going, and help our clients prepare for what comes next.

What sets ITML apart from similar solutions in the market? What specific value do you deliver to your customers and partners?

Four things. And none of them is technology.

1. We innovate, simplify, and deliver in that order. This is not a tagline — it is a sequence. We track EU R&D investment as a compass. When we see a funding wave building in a domain — cybersecurity, compliance, maritime intelligence, AI — we put a team on it, experiment with the technology, and develop real fluency before the market demands it. Then we take that fluency and do what most research-led organisations struggle to do: simplify it into something a non-specialist can use, and deliver it with enterprise-grade rigour. The result is products that are genuinely innovative and genuinely production-ready — not a compromise between the two.

2. We eat what we cook. - Every product we bring to market was born from a real problem. Our cybersecurity monitoring platform came from years of research & innovation, then watching clients pay enterprise prices for enterprise complexity they didn't need — so we built a better-calibrated alternative on open foundations. AccesSEO — our AI-powered SEO and accessibility audit platform — came from watching digital teams lose hours manually managing metadata and alt-texts across large CMS environments. We saw the problem, we built the fix, and we shipped it. We build what we understand, and we understand it because we have lived in it.

3. We build with the best — not for them. - Some of our strongest products were not built alone. Shipify is a good example: we co-developed it with Enisolv, maritime specialists who brought domain knowledge in vessel performance, fleet analytics, and IMO/EU emissions compliance. We brought the engineering and AI. Neither of us could have built it alone — and the result is a platform that is genuinely better for that partnership. When we find domain experts who understand their sector the way we understand technology, we build things together.

4. We are genuinely hybrid — delivery and product. - Most IT firms are one or the other. Pure service companies sell person-days. Pure product companies sell licences. We do both — which means we can enter a client as a delivery partner and exit as a strategic one, with a product embedded in their workflow. We have done this in media, maritime, public administration, and financial services. The trust that comes from delivery is what opens the door to the product conversation.

What has been your biggest challenge so far — and how did you overcome it?

Scaling. Going from a founding team to 100 people means the company that got you to 10 cannot get you to 100. Processes, hierarchy, role clarity — none of it feels urgent when you are small, and all of it becomes critical before you realise you needed it.

Underneath that sits the harder problem: blending two cultures that most companies keep separate. R&I people are wired for curiosity — they follow a thread, they run stress tests at midnight because something is happening, not because a deadline says so. B2B delivery people are wired for accountability — they define scope, manage risk, and hit the milestone. At ITML, we decided early that these are not opposing forces to be managed but complementary capacities to be connected. The answer was closed feedback loops: delivery teams surface real client problems back to research teams, research teams produce outputs that delivery teams can actually ship. Neither side operates in isolation. The innovation is grounded, and the delivery is informed. That loop is what turns research investment into commercial traction — and it is what makes our products different from what a pure services firm or a pure product company could build alone.

But the most important thing — the one that compounds over time — is people. Not just talent acquisition. People development. Every person in this company needs to grow beyond their current discipline: the researcher learns to communicate value, the engineer learns to manage up, the project manager learns enough domain depth to earn the room's respect. We invest in this continuously and without apology.

And here is why it matters more than anything else on this list: people who are in the habit of learning do something else natively. They adapt. In a market that shifts at an unprecedented pace, adaptability is not a soft skill — it is the only durable competitive advantage a company can have.

We are not building a headcount. We are building with people who can handle what comes next, whatever that turns out to be.

What are the most important lessons you’ve learned along the way?

Simplicity is wisdom. The clearest thinker in the room is usually the one who can explain the most complex problem in the fewest words. We now treat simplicity as a quality standard — in our proposals, our architecture, our communication. If we cannot explain what we built in plain language, we have not finished building it.

Stay hungry — and make sure the team knows why. We operate in a market where the skills valued today will be irrelevant in five years. AI is not coming for jobs — it is coming for tasks. The people who thrive are the ones who retrain faster than the market replaces them. We try to build that instinct into every hire we make.

Trust is the only moat. In regulated sectors, in long-cycle procurement, in EU-funded projects — relationships built on trust outlast any price advantage, any feature advantage, any platform advantage. We have won tenders against larger competitors because a client trusted us. We have lost tenders to smaller competitors because they trusted someone else. Build trust like it's infrastructure.

In all cases its either win or learn. Or sometimes both! We stopped calling things failures. The word closes the conversation before it starts. Every project that did not land the way we planned taught us something — about the client, about our assumptions, about the gap between what we built and what was actually needed. That knowledge compounds. Some of our best commercial outcomes came directly from engagements that started with challenges. In a market that moves this fast, every outcome is data. The only real failure is not using it.

ITML is heavily involved in Research & Innovation projects, and you use those funded R&I initiatives to strengthen your products. Turning research results into commercial products is often a complex and challenging process. How do you manage this transition?

The honest answer: badly at first. And then better.

The hardest thing we have had to build is not a product. It is a culture that can hold two things at the same time: the freedom to experiment, and the discipline to deliver.

We learned from the process of letting both experimentation and delivery flourish at the same time. The answer was not to merge the two cultures — it was to respect the separation. Today, we run verticals with distinct identities: our R&I teams have the mandate and the space to think ahead, to track where the EU is investing, to prototype things that may not pay off for three years. Our delivery teams have the mandate to make those outputs real — on time, on spec, at enterprise grade.

The two verticals meet at the product layer. That is where the feedback loops become creative.

R&D funding is not a business model. It is an R&D budget for companies smart enough to treat it that way. We try to be that company.

Shipify again is a clear example. Co-developed with Enisolv — maritime specialists in vessel performance and emissions compliance — it grew from EU-funded maritime research into a production platform that shipping companies use today to track hull condition, fuel consumption, and GHG emissions against IMO and EU MRV frameworks. The research did not create the product. The product was already alive — the partnership and the funding gave it a runway. The same pattern holds for our cybersecurity monitoring platform, our GDPR compliance automation tool, and AccesSEO. Eighty-eight funded projects are completed or ongoing. Each one is a product sprint. Each one is a step closer to something the market will buy without a grant attached.

This is what we mean by the sequence: we innovate. simplify. deliver. The research is where innovation lives. The product is where simplification happens. The client relationship is where delivery earns its name.