The week in Italian startups - Issue #8
The Money
Fleep Technologies raised Eur 800K to take its flexible electronics to market. Investors include angels from Italian Angels for Growth, Club degli Investitori, the Cogliati family and Pariter Partners.
PinCell, a biotech startup developing therapies for rare skin diseases, raised Eur 1.65M from Sofinnova Partners.
iGenius, a startup operating in applying AI technology to business intelligence, announced a new Eur 10M round by an angels syndicate. The startup has raised a total of almost Eur 20M since its launch.
Fondazione Golinelli, a private philantropic association, announced the 5 startups that will partecipate to the G-Factor accelerator program, aimed at life science innovation. The program is financed with a total of Eur 1M.
Accenture Italy acquired Nike Group, a company offering RegTech services and products.
Funds are raising, too
Fondo Italiano d'Investimento SGR announces the final closing of its FII Tech Growth fund at Eur 123M, falling short of the original Eur 150M target. The fund invests in growth phase startups.
Avanzi and Etica SGR announced the first closing of aImpact, a social impact venture fund with a target size of Eur 40M. They also announced the first two investments for a total of Eur 1M.
Corporates are investing, too
Satya Nadella announced on Twitter a $1.5 billion investment in Italy over the next five years.
Everybody is worried about VC during the crisis
This time is the Kauffman Fellowship's turn to share their insight about how VCs are reacting to the pandemic. It turns out that also VCs appear to be worried about VC - with many respondents to the survey expecting harder fundraising for their funds, increased allocation to follow-ons and portfolio rebalancing.
Fact of the month
I have just run a quick search on Crunchbase: in April 2020 more than Eur 35M in venture rounds in Italian companies were announced. That's still not great compared to our peers, but the market is not frozen (yet). Let me hope that the coverage of recent investments at our latitude is still far from perfect.
That's all for this week. As always, feel free to hit reply to let me know your thoughts and comments, or forward this email to someone who could find it useful.
#stay safe,
N.