The week in Italian startups - Issue #12
The Money
OraPesce, a "sea-to-fork" ecommerce startup specialized in fresh seafood, 🇮🇹announced the successful closing of a €400K crowdfunding campaign. Like many ecommerce companies offering food and groceries, OraPesce enjoyed a 10X raise in demand during the lockdown.
This week in startup M&A
Campari Group acquired 49% of Tannico, one of the leading wine&spirits e-commerce platforms in Italy. Tannico raised a €3.8M Series A from P101 and angels in 2016 and reported a €20.3M turnover in 2019. 🇮🇹According to news sources, Campari Group agreed to pay a total of €23M for the acquired stake.
Beneficy, a Turin-based startup offering welfare products and services, 🇮🇹 announced on its blog that TeamSystem, a major Italian vendor of business software, acquired 51% of the company. Terms undisclosed.
Everybody is worried about COVID-19
I know this is not strictly related to Italy, but I've been posting links to articles about the effect of the pandemic on LPs, VCs and startups for a while now. Nations are re-opening but the topic is still heavily debated:
this week we had Christoph Janz from Point Nine Capital in a video on fundraising during a pandemic and in writing on whether VCs are still investing (spoiler: based on Crunchbase data, he notes a sharp recovery of deals reported in May vs April). I've been discussing this with a friend lately, and he points out the right question yet to be answered: did the negotiations for these deals start before or after the pandemic? It would be interesting to slice the dataset by date of first meeting / termsheet. Anyone working on this?
Apparently, Europe has JEDIs fighting for innovation (and against COVID19? Hold the Force, they are not using lightsabers but a more mundane open call for innovators).
Finally, sometimes the "VCs are not investing" narrative goes the other way around, as in startups delaying fundraising and waiting for better times, and better termsheets.
This week in startup research
PWC and NetConsultingCube published their yearly report on the Italian Fintech market. The ~100 pages report analyzes 364 companies, and offers a good overview of what's going on in the Italian Fintech scene.
Dealroom published an interesting report about the future of online marketplaces.
IDInvest published its European Consumer Startup Map. The research somewhat leans towards their portfolio/interests, but a few Italian startups made it in the chart. Bonus points for finding them out 😊.
I received extremely useful feedback and requests in the last couple of weeks, big thanks to everybody who took the effort and reached out!
Some of you asked about coverage of startup-related events in Italy (e.g. accelerator deadlines, call for ideas, demo days). Let me take the opportunity to point you at Startup Digest Italy, curated by Emil Abirascid. The weekly email should cover all your cravings for deadlines and events.
Have a great week,
Nico
P.S. feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone you think might find it useful, and don't hold back from hitting "reply" with comments or feedback!