The week in Italian startups - Issue #19

Niccolò Sanarico

Jul 26, 2020

Deliveristo, a B2B food delivery startup, 🇮🇹 raised €1.5M from a syndicate of investors including IAG, Gellify, and the Moratti's family office. The company operates in the same space as 🇮🇹Soplaya (see issue #17), 🇮🇹 🇪🇸 Katoo, and the 🇩🇪 heavyweight Choco [cb].
United Ventures [cb] 🇮🇹 announced a €3M investment in InSilicoTrials [cb], a startup offering a secure simulation environment to pharma companies and research labs. Pi Campus [cb] participated in the round.
Sardex [cb], a fintech company developing a commercial credit system, 🇮🇹 announced the closing of a new €5.8M round, led by CDP Venture Capital, Fondazione di Sardegna, and Primomiglio (disclaimer - I'm part of Primomiglio investment team). Sardex powered +€100M in commercial transactions on its system so far.
Berlin-based Habyt [cb], a prop-tech startup developing co-living spaces, announced a €3.5M round led by P101 [cb] and Picus Capital [cb]. At the same time, the company announced the acquisition of GoLiving.

M&A

SECO [cb], an embedded computing and IoT producer, 🇮🇹 announced the acquisition of Ispirata [cb], a startup developing a data orchestration solution (named Astarte) based in Milan. Amount undisclosed.
Madrid-based Playtomic [cb] announced the acquisition of Milan-based PrenotaUnCampo [cb]. Sport-tech is enjoying the increasing digitization of consumers accelerated by COVID-19.

New funding opportunities

CDP Venture Capital and Cube Labs announced a co-investment partnership. Cube Labs is an industrial holding focused on investments in life sciences startups at the pre-seed and seed stages. The agreement is aimed at startups located in Southern Italy.
Lumen Ventures [cb], a seed-stage investment vehicle, was finally approved by the Bank of Italy. The fund aims to raise up to € 25M.

Innovative Startups

A few years back (circa 2012), the Italian government decided to create a special section of the national company registry dedicated to innovative startups, introducing a set of criteria that have to be met to be awarded the special status (either a patent, a minimum number of employees with higher degrees, a minimum amount of investment in R&D). Being an innovative startup gives access to several perks: lower costs, easier bureaucracy, a special tax regime for investors, and more.

🇮🇹 Infocamere and the Ministry for Economic Development just published a joint report regarding the special section. Here some of the key figures:

>11K registered companies, 27% based in Lombardy
Only 13.2% have female founders. Bad.
Very low average revenues (±163K) - [this is a feature of the registry: as soon as the company grows, it enters... well, another special registry].

The registry is open and freely accessible, in case you are curious. Just, don't expect that all the startups listed there meet the usual "VC" expectation of what a startup is - after all, it is just based on a legal, a priori, definition of "startup".