She grew up in a traditional Greek Cypriot home with a very traditional “safe” future in the books: study, work in the government or the bank, and settle until retirement. Maria Lavithi didn’t want safety; she wanted adventure. At eighteen, leaving her family that had never left Nicosia, she got on a plane to Pueblo, Colorado (a place she describes as “three buildings, a few scorpions, and a few cacti”), and so her chapter of exploration and discovery began.
Maria Lavithi is the founder of Heroes Made, an edtech platform focused on Social Emotional Learning (SEL), designed for elementary schools, helping schools build academic and human skills in children. She also mentors startups in Cyprus.
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What drives her, she says, is curiosity. A refusal to accept that things are the way they are simply because no one has changed them yet.
“Everything on this earth is created by us, and therefore it can be improved by us. I was never comfortable when people said this is the way it is.”
says Maria.
That instinct caused her trouble growing up. Looking back, she sees it as the thing that made her.
Her path from Cyprus took her through Colorado, then Louisiana, where she studied Creative Writing, then Hawaii — first the Big Island, then Honolulu — where she spent nearly six years as a concierge for the wealthy and the famous, experiencing everything the island had to offer. It was not the job she had envisioned, but it taught her a lot about life and connection. “People are people,” she says. “It doesn’t matter how much money we have or don’t have. Everybody is going through the exact same journey.”
Hawaii is also where she met her husband, who is now her co-founder and the illustrator behind Heroes Made. The route there was as unplanned as everything else: a relationship took her from Hawaii to Virginia, Virginia led her back to Cyprus, and Cyprus is where Heroes Made began.
The idea came from her daughter. When she was around six, her daughter experienced every parent’s worst nightmare: she was bullied. Maria watched a sociable, happy child start saying she didn’t want to go to school. “These little moments shape us and shape the mechanisms that we use in life and how we view the world,” she says.
She and her husband put together a system of stories, placing their daughter in the narrative as the hero, teaching her lessons in courage, communication, and how to set boundaries. These became their daughter’s bedtime stories.
Their daughter became friends with the girl who had bullied her, went on to become class president, and started mentoring other children. “I wondered if I could replicate this,” Maria says. “If we can build a system of stories and put it in every class, and give this opportunity to every child.”
Heroes Made was conceptualised in 2019, just before COVID made it impossible to raise capital or move forward for three years. The team started building in 2022. The product has since been piloted in private elementary schools in Cyprus and is now entering the US market, where schools have more autonomy and technology infrastructure than the European system, which operates through ministries and is slower to move. “The education system is highly resistant to change,” she says. “The challenge for us is not to keep the client, it’s to get the client.”
Maria’s two values in life, named without hesitation, are courage and gratitude. Courage because every step of building something new requires it, and the bar keeps rising. Gratitude because investors put money in people they didn’t know a year ago and tell them to go build their dream. “I think that’s spectacular,” she says. “I think they need more credit.”
Her advice to anyone about to make a big decision is drawn from Dr Seuss. “Don’t stay in the waiting place,” she says. “Only you can give yourself permission. Not your parents, not your family, not your spouse. Go forward. Even if you’re not sure, change your path later. You’ll learn something on the way.”
Maria Lavithi is a guest on The Future Makers: Women Building Cyprus. The full episode, including her reflections on building Heroes Made, navigating the edtech market, and what character education could change for an entire generation, 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.
