She grew up in a small town in Lithuania called Radviliškis, in a family of wrestlers and teachers, with a brother four years older than her and a circle of aunties and grandparents who were always close by. From the outside, it looked like her life plan would follow a “no-surprises” trajectory. Finish university with a “safe” law degree. Get a job in a law firm, perhaps with her brother. A salary at the end of the month. Something everyone could understand.
But Greta went completely off script.
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Greta Skemaite is co-founder and CEO of VG Freyia Labs, a deeptech foodtech startup based in Cyprus. The company is developing F.O.R.S.E.T.I.X., a machine-learning-powered platform that helps food and beverage producers optimise their fermentation processes. But beyond the software, Freyia’s mission is to help rebuild food systems that are intelligent, inclusive, and waste-free.
Greta brings over 15 years of legal experience to the role, but the irony is that she never wanted to be a lawyer. Her dream at school was to be a journalist in conflict zones. When she finished her Bachelor’s in Law, she applied to a military academy that offered International Law, but her mother asked her, kindly but firmly, not to go. She stayed in the same university, chose International Law anyway, and told herself it would open doors. She also told herself she would never work in corporate. As the irony of life would have it, she would spend over a decade in corporate legal roles before walking away to build something of her own. The other irony of life is that she spent this decade very far from her home base in Lithuania…in Cyprus.
The move to Cyprus had not been planned either. She had won an internship project working with African children, which had long been her intention, only for a letter from the European Union to arrive at the last minute saying the funding had been postponed. A friend, married to a Cypriot, said come and relax for a while. A couple of years earlier, Greta had visited the island and told herself she would never live there. “Never say never,” she says, “this kind of repeats itself during my life.”
The corporation would teach her some very important lessons for life and business. A business partnership split unexpectedly, and she asked her former boss why. His answer was blunt, unemotional. “Business is business. Nothing personal.” She didn’t like hearing that. But she came to believe it completely.
“When I see challenges in my entrepreneurial journey, that’s what I always remember. Don’t take it personally. It’s just business.”
What eventually pushed her out of corporate wasn’t a single moment but the accumulation of moments that eventually overflowed. She had spent five years at one major law firm, then seven or eight years at a leading fiduciary firm, where she went deep into trust law and built training programmes for colleagues. “At some point I realised I did not agree with certain rules,” she says. “If you do not like rules that are set on you by somebody else, then you just create your own.”
Freyia Labs grew out of her husband’s and co-founder’s, Vasilis Joseph, recovery from a serious car accident. Previously, he had run his own marketing company, closed it after the accident, and gone through an extremely difficult period. He needed to find his way back to something. Greta encouraged him to do anything, just to find his drive again. He started experimenting with fungi, then chilies, and then fermentation took hold. He was so passionate that she, too, became curious. The business grew from there, with her concentrating on legal and commercial structure while he drove product development. “At the end of the day, we both look back two or three years and see how many things we did together,” she says. “I’m not saying that life is all flowers and hearts now. It has its challenges. But these flowers and hearts come when we actually look back and see what we built together.”
The company is named after their daughter, Freyia, who arrived around the same time as her namesake, Freyia Labs. She comes to conferences, has her own company t-shirt, and once made friends with one of the most senior people at an EIT food event in Brussels, introducing herself before her mother got the chance. “She’s the best networking participant,” Greta says, laughing. But behind the warmth, there is also a public statement. Professional events need kids’ corners. Workplaces need family days. Indeed, at an EIT Food event in Bilbao, she stepped up to one of the managers mid-conference.
“I said, look, you have to do something. There are so many women, and you’re telling me that they don’t have children”
she recalls.
He agreed with her. Women were already leaving early to pick up children from school, losing the very networking and speaking opportunities the event was built around. It is not a Cyprus problem; she is very vocal about that. It is a wider work culture problem.
Asked about her values, she doesn’t hesitate. Loyalty. Loyalty to yourself, to your beliefs, to your family, to your work. It runs through everything she talks about, including why she named a company after her daughter and brings her to events across Europe. “Everything we do is for her,” she says. “It is for our family, but ultimately it is for her.”
Greta Skemaite is the fifth guest on The Future Makers: Women Building Cyprus. The full episode, including her reflections on building as a mother and entrepreneur, the fermentation technology behind Freya Labs, and what she believes Cyprus needs to change for working parents, is available to watch now.
The Future Makers Podcast is a series of in-depth conversations about how future-makers are made, in Cyprus and beyond. Host Annetta Benzar sits down with people who are a leading force in our shared future and looks past the titles. Together, they travel back to the people and moments that shaped them, walk through the choices and challenges they are living through now, and look ahead to the futures they are trying to build.
The first season, Women Building Cyprus, follows women whose lives and decisions are changing what this island can be.
A production of The Future Media.
