The week in Italian startups - Issue #24
The Money
Zerynth [cb], the developer of a proprietary IoT device managment platform ,🇮🇹 raised €2M from Vertis SGR [cb].
Trapview [cb], an agri-tech startup from Slovenia producing tools and software for automated pest monitoring, raised €3.7M from Oltre Venture [cb], a sustainable economy & social impact Italian VC, and from a Dutch syndicate ("Put your money where your meaning is community", love the name!)
Milan-based Jobtech, a digital job agency focused on temporary work, 🇮🇹 raised €1.5M from a syndicate of angel investors including Alberto Genovese (founder of prima.it and facile.it). Future of work? 😉
Turin-based Corion Biotech [cb], a biotech company developing a therapy for preeclampsia (a pathology affecting pregnant women), raised a €1M round from LIFTT and Finde, an investment holding owned by the Denegri family.
Private Equity going social
Tommaso Zorzi is a social media influencer (837K follower on his Instagram profile). Nothing unusual, but the interesting news here is that he transferred all the rights to his image and to his work into a newco ("House of Talent"), and then he went on🇮🇹 raising a round from a syndicate of investors including The Hundred and other angels. I could not find the round size, but at least one source writes of "a few million euros".
The tagline of The Hundred says it all: "invest in entertainers like VC invests in startups".
M&A
Spin-up, a media-tech company focusing on performance marketing and digital product development,🇮🇹 acquired Rewave, a software development studio. The combined entity is still relatively small (€3M expected revenues for 2020), but with an aggressive plan of additional acquisitions in the coming years, culminating in an IPO in 2023.
Gellify is an investor and open innovation platform focused on B2B startups. We met them several times in this newsletter. They are back with the acquisition of Bit2Win from Accenture: Bit2Win is an order management and sales acceleration software based on Salesforce, acquired by ACN back in 2016. This move strengthens the Gellify platform, as it adds more "operating" parts into their offering.
Europe VS stablecoins
Italy, Germany, France, Spain, and the Netherlands "called on the European Commission to draw up strict regulation for asset-backed cryptocurrencies such as stablecoins to protect consumers and preserve state sovereignty in monetary policy". Regulators are not happy about losing the power of managing monetary policy 🙄 . The Libra project spooked them quite a bit!
Ending notes
That's all for this issue. Have a great week!
Nico
