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.