FOUNDER. ENGINEER. ENTREPRENEUR.
I’m Vasilis, an AI engineer and venture founder. I build AI systems that turn complex information into useful decisions—and lead the teams that bring them into the real world.
Explore my work
01 / SELECTED WORK & IMPACT
Agentic workflows, trained models, and live speech systems. Engineering shaped around the people who use it.
I lead a team of four engineers on a production multi-agent system that extracts and verifies corporate-registry information for a Tier-1 European bank. Reviews that took days now produce same-day, human-approved output. I own the release checks, supported by 1,000+ human-verified entities, and route uncertain results to an analyst.
At Innovation Bee, I fine-tuned three open-weight models to learn domain-specific rules. The tuned models passed rule-based checks their untuned baselines failed. I brought one model into serving and rebuilt training data so answers could be checked against their original sources.
Explore my AI workI built the speech-to-speech pipeline behind ihos: a guide speaks, guests scan a QR code, and each listens in their own language. Live captions and translated questions help the conversation flow, using the phones guests already carry.
Explore ihos.ai02 / THE FOUNDER’S CHAPTER
I co-founded Innovation Bee to turn ambitious research into useful products. As CTO, I set the technical direction for seven engineers across four AI products and co-led five EU-funded R&D consortia.
Three of those consortia went from proposal to deployed systems. We also helped bring ANKO’s business-support assistant to life, giving businesses access to information on funding, licensing, legislation, and export support.
Before Innovation Bee, I co-founded Gridustry and built its green-energy certification platform. We raised pre-seed investment from a major Greek electricity provider.
Discover Innovation Bee
03 / RESEARCH INTO PRACTICE
I study how AI learns, where it fails, and how we can know when to trust it. I’m a PhD candidate in AI & Optimization at the University of Western Macedonia, with my thesis in submission. My research connects machine learning with optimization; my independent work puts language models to the test.
Explore my open-source workPHD RESEARCH · AI & OPTIMIZATION
Combining passive and active learning to recover correct optimization models with fewer questions for the human expert.
Hybrid constraint acquisitionAI RELIABILITY · OPEN BENCHMARK
4,992 episodes. 13 injected faults. A benchmark measuring whether models recognize silent failures—or stay confidently wrong.
toolfaultLANGUAGE MODEL EVALUATION
Thema evaluates 24 language models on 519 questions from 40 official exam papers, using the national marking scheme.
ThemaVELOS · PRECISION AGRICULTURE · JUL 2021–AUG 2022
I contributed machine learning to VELOS, a precision-agriculture project for bean farms. Our published work explores detecting disease from a small set of leaf images using data augmentation and deep learning.
Python · TensorFlow · Keras · OpenCV04 / ON STAGE & IN CONVERSATION
PRAGUE · 2025
Addressing over-fitting in constraint acquisition through active learning.
Research presentation
PIRAEUS · 2024
How solution diversity shapes the quality of learned constraints.
Research presentationATHENS · 2025
Bringing applied AI and our work at Innovation Bee to a wider audience.
Industry & entrepreneurship05 / MILESTONES ALONG THE WAY
Recognition is a moment in a much longer story. These are a few I’m proud to share with the people who made them possible.
FORBES GREECE · 2023
Recognized alongside my Gridustry co-founders.
STARTUPPER AWARDS · 2025
A milestone for the Innovation Bee team.
SMART & SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE
Our AI-powered approach to early plant-disease detection.
VASILEIOS BALAFAS06 / A LITTLE ABOUT ME
I’m at my best where the research, the engineering, and the business meet. I care about understanding a problem deeply—and staying with it until something useful exists in the world.
My path has taken me from building a green-energy venture at Gridustry to co-founding Innovation Bee, and now to leading applied AI work at Accenture. Alongside that, I’m completing my PhD in AI and Optimization at the University of Western Macedonia.
The thread through it all? Build things that matter. Bring good people along.
HAVE SOMETHING IN MIND?
For applied AI projects, venture collaborations,
and speaking invitations.