The Week in Italian Startups

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The week in Italian startups - Issue #11

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The week in Italian startups - Issue #11

Niccolò Sanarico
May 31, 2020
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The week in Italian startups - Issue #11

dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com

The Money

  • Commerce Layer, a Florence-based headless e-commerce platform, raised 6M USD from a syndicate of investors led by Benchmark Capital.

  • IntendiMe, a Cagliari-based startup aimed at helping people with hearing problems, raised EUR 2.4M from Vertis SGR (🇮🇹).

  • Poke House, a fast casual food brand specialized in Californian Poke, raised EUR 5M from Milano Investment Partners (🇮🇹), a fund specialized in retail innovation. Poke House has opened 8 shops in its first year of operations so far, and is opening 3 more in the coming weeks.

  • Creactives Group, a company developing Artificial Intelligence solutions for the industry (including procurement, inventory management, logistics, etc..), started trading on the Vienna stock exchange on May 20th with a market cap of EUR 38M.

  • London and Milan-based Mela Works announced a 1.5M EUR  investment round (🇮🇹) by 360 Capital Partners. The startup developed a mobile app to track field work, saving time and easing reporting, scheduling and sharing work information.

News in fintech: crowdfunding platforms expanding their perimeter

  • Equity crowdfunding platforms Opstart and Crowdfundme have been allowed by (🇮🇹) CONSOB to start offering "mini" bonds and other debt instruments on their platforms. Crowdfunding has been an important source of funding for startups in Italy. According to a very rough estimate I made, Italian startups have raised >70M EUR through the leading platforms since 2016. This new regulation will likely allow the platforms to become a longer-term service provider. So long to the old-style, boutique investment bankers?

  • Meanwhile, Unicredit participated in a EUR 8.5M funding round raised by Icelandic startup Meniga, a digital banking services provider.

M&A

  • TIM, one of the leading telcos in Italy, acquired Noovle, a consulting and system integration firm and one of the major Google Cloud partners in Italy.

Uber Italy

  • A unit of Uber Italy has been put under special administration under accusations of drivers exploitation.

This is it for this issue. I'm planning a gradual expansion of the topics covered in the newsletter. I'm considering adding primary content / research / interviews from our ecosystem: if you have requests or proposals, feel free to hit reply.

Have a great week!

N.

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The week in Italian startups - Issue #11

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