How Nodes & Links raised $12 million to disrupt the management of complex projects

Fresh from raising US$12 million to set foot in the US, Nodes & Links co-founder Christos Ellinas sat down with GOLD magazine to discuss the challenge of selling cutting-edge software – an AI-powered platform for managing complex infrastructure and construction projects – to one of the most nuanced B2B sectors around. He also expressed his views on what Cyprus' commercialisation scene is missing and why having a meaningful job doesn’t require spending long hours in a small cubicle in a major business centre like London.

Dr Christos Ellinas leaned forward, exhaling sharply and paused before stating: “In Cyprus, we are measuring the wrong thing. We measure success in how much money we raise to create Centres of Excellence. That’s a very strong vanity measure.”

I was with the co-founder and CTO of Nodes & Links to discuss the spinout’s new milestone, a US$12 million Series B round of funding led by London-based ETF Partners when our conversation shifted from funding success to a key bottleneck in Cyprus’ broader startup scene – commercialisation.

Parts of the scene are growing. Fintech and video games, in particular, have climbed 14 spots to 25th globally in the 2024 StartupBlink Ecosystem Index, which is based on data from 1,000 cities across 100 counters. But when it comes to turning academic research into viable businesses, the startup scene is stuck on a treadmill. Between 2016 and the first half of 2024, most of the Cyprus Research and Innovation Foundation’s €180 million grants purse went to academic research, yet only a fraction led to commercial ventures.

A fundamental mismatch of definitions

To be fair, this issue manifests across the entire EU, as noted in Mario Draghi’s 2024 report on European Competitiveness. For Ellinas, it comes down to a fundamental mismatch of definitions. In academia, securing grants is a quantitative indicator of success while the h-index, a metric that tracks publications against citations, remains a key benchmark. For a spinout, success means sales and private investment. “If we position success as getting fundamental research into the field, and if the definition of the field is that a non-academic has bought it, then under that test, what we are measuring always fails.” Ellinas said. It’s two different worlds that have yet to reconcile but even when going into the “field” one can stumble on contradictions, as Ellinas had painfully discovered.

Part of Nodes & Links’ product suite stems from Ellinas’ doctorate research at Bristol University. There, he adapted models used by epidemiologists to track disease outbreaks, applying them to predict how failures ripple through complex projects – railways, highways, data centres, nuclear reactors and beyond. Speaking with the clarity of someone who has lived inside an idea for years, he explained that in disease outbreaks, it is the initial spread and the network of social interactions that determine whether it turns into a pandemic. Projects, he explained, follow the same principles. The million-dollar question, then: Of all the tasks that could go wrong, which ones will set off a chain reaction?

A resistance to change

The world of complex projects is riddled with unique nuances. One that stands out is resistance to change, with the industry – comprising general contracts, asset owners and middlemen – attached to familiar but old tools. Ellinas pointed to Primavera Systems, a project management platform developed in the early 1980s that is still widely used today. It is built on a mechanistic worldview that assumes complex systems are predictable and controllable. In this world, if a critical task faces a 10-day delay, the ruling assumption is that the entire project will be delayed by no more than 10 days. The logic follows that focusing on that specific task will do the trick. “In a nonlinear world,” Ellinas argued, “those 10 days of delay may propagate and amplify, turning into 100 days.” For him, as with disease outbreaks, complex projects are best defined by the interactions among various activities, where emergent behaviours can spiral into unexpected directions. It’s a radically different approach. “The main vendors in this space don’t actively evolve their products and the industry has largely stayed behind because of that,” he said. Indicatively, Primavera Systems was acquired by Oracle in 2008. Ellina’s blunt assessment of the market’s monopolistic tendencies, even referring to users as “hostages” of outdated software, is striking. But software is not the only problem. Decision-making in this industry is a slow-moving cacophony of executive voices by people who are used to buying services, not software. And the actual users often lack the budgetary power to make purchasing decisions, leaving final approvals in the hands of IT or function leads, who can veto even when the user base demands change.

Putting sales people in the US

Despite the apparent inertia, Ellinas sees a major opportunity. Profit margins in complex projects are typically low, so a few delays can wipe out the entire project’s earnings, creating a need for efficiency that is trending toward increased adoption of more sophisticated project management solutions. Nodes & Links has onboarded a strong portfolio of leading companies, including British smart infrastructure company Costain, US data centre constructor Equinix, Inc., American semiconductor bigwig Intel and US-based infrastructure consulting firm AECOM. Despite the existing US-flavoured clientele, Ellinas stressed that his firm was rather opportunistic in chasing that market so far. This is where most of the Series B funding will go: to put salespeople in the US. “We’re really excited to work with ETF Partners,” he said. “They’ve got people on the team with deep knowledge of this space, so they really understand how big it is.” One of EFT’s partners is Claudio Simao, who has served as the global CTO and regional CEO of Hexagon AB, which supplies software to the construction industry and raked in US$5.81 billion in revenues in 2024.

Nodes & Links’ product suite

Ironically, Nodes & Links’ product suite is quite straightforward. First, there’s the classic automation tool, which streamlines the client’s project database, simplifying things to lower the barrier for non-technical users. Then, there’s the Predictive AI product, born from Ellinas’ research, which uses existing project data to generate more data-driven predictions around the uncertainty of delivering a product. More recently, the platform has added two Generative AI products: a chatbot and a report generator. The latter addresses a notorious time sink – reports, which typically consume 20% of a project’s timeline. “We totally eliminate that; you can get your report with literally three clicks, freeing up that 20% to actually focus on fixing the project,” he told GOLD. ETF Partners and London-based 2050, the leading investor in the previous US$11 million round, are both sustainability-focused, so Nodes & Links enables clients to upload their standard data and calculate the carbon footprint of an entire operation, including the embodied carbon of materials and equipment. The platform also helps keep the industry honest in a sense: general contractors typically try to drive up costs by constantly submitting change requests, much like a legal team burying the opposition in evidence, as the owners don’t have the time or expertise to filter them out. Nodes & Links can track changes in seconds. One of its clients, Turner & Townsend, a leading global programme and construction management company based in Leeds, used Nodes & Links on a data centre project to improve the workflow of change tracking, speeding up the process by 40 times compared to traditional tools.

Christos Ellinas doesn’t subscribe to the idea that Generative AI will replace knowledge workers. His perspective is naturally shaped by the high stakes of the industry in which Nodes & Links operates. When something goes wrong in the construction of a nuclear reactor, you need to understand why and, ideally, who’s responsible; you simply can’t point the finger at an LLM. The mission-critical nature of Nodes & Links’ platform also raises concerns around data security. “People are starting to realise that deploying GenAI in a B2C context is very different from a B2B one,” he said, acknowledging that the technology still leaves much to be desired in decision-making support as it is, after all, inherently a black box. For Ellinas, the real promise of Generative AI lies in how knowledge workers will adapt to leverage these tools to unlock productivity gains without overreliance on weaknesses, like the interpretability of resources.

Hiring red flags

When Ellinas and Greg Lawton founded Nodes & Links in 2019, after meeting at the London-based Entrepreneur First accelerator and instantly clicking, part of their plan was to anchor the spinout in Cyprus. Today, 20 of its 45 employees are based locally, half of whom are Cypriot expats. This hiring strategy was intentional, especially in the early days. “I stayed in the UK for 10 years for my career but I realised that you didn’t need to be abroad to find a company with a global impact. You don’t have to choose between a fulfilling, impactful job and a good souvlaki!” Ellinas said, between jest and seriousness. Interestingly, bringing in Cypriot expats had another advantage: avoiding what Ellinas sees as a cultural trap. Candidates who have been in Cyprus for too long, he believes, risk absorbing the country’s siga-siga (slowly-slowly) mentality. “We actively filter for that. If someone’s had more than two years of experience in Cyprus, that’s a red flag,” he said.

How should success be measured?

Returning to the question of Cyprus’ commercialisation bottleneck, one issue remained: how should success be measured?

Ellinas cracked a smile. “We don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” he replied.

In more successful commercialisation systems, universities measure teams by the number of spinouts they produce – spinouts positioned to translate fundamental research into products and generate revenues. “We need to be clear about what a spinout is,” he continued. “It’s something that tries to make a mark in the commercial landscape. And if you’re in the leadership of a spinout with a fiduciary duty to shareholders to create value, you can’t have a full-time job where you’re measured by how many papers you publish.”

In other words, it’s not just about spinning out research; it’s also about turning an academic into an entrepreneur.

“Well,” he said, “if they choose to do that, great. If they choose not to, that’s fine too. We just need to be conscious of it. A spinout should not simply be the side project of an academic.”

(Photo by TASPHO )

This article was first published in the March issue of GOLD magazine. To view it click here