The week in Italian startups - Issue #27
The Money
Wise [cb] raised €15M in a Series C round led by CDP Venture Capital and including Indaco Ventures and EUREKA! Venture. Wise is developing implantable leads for brain-machine interfaces.
Neuranix, a hearing screening and diagnostics startup incubated in Campana NewSteel, 🇮🇹 raised €480K in a round syndicated by CDP Venture Capital, through its fund dedicated to startups based in Southern Italy.
M&A
Casa.it was acquired by EQT. Casa.it is one of the largest Italian online real estate classified companies. This announcement comes one week after EQT announced the acquisition of Idealista in Spain.
Italian telco operator Fastweb 🇮🇹 acquired 70% of cybersecurity startup 7Layers [cb], specialized in MDR, MSS, EDR, and SOC. Valuation undisclosed.
Casavo [cb], the real estate instant-buying startup based in Milan, 🇮🇹 acquired virtual house tours startup Realisti.co [cb]. Details of the acquisition are undisclosed.
Technology&consulting firm Lutech 🇮🇹 acquired BeeToBit, a Cagliari-based cloud services provider.
Moonshots
Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, committed to invest €1Bn in European "moonshots" over the next decade. The equivalent of at least 2-3 growth stage funds.
State of AI 2020
By now you are probably well aware of it but otherwise be warned that Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth have just published their State of AI 2020 report. Of the 170+ slides, one sentence hit me:
We’re rapidly approaching outrageous computational, economic, and environmental costs to gain incrementally smaller improvements in model performance
I wonder if we are on the verge of a technology breakthrough underlying the next wave of AI. Is Quantum ML the next step?
Other readings this week
Beatrice Aliprandi, a principal at Talis Capital, published a couple of interesting posts about the female healthcare market. A good reading if you are interested in the market.
I tend not to take too seriously the "XX things that will kill/scale/exit your startup" posts. But when someone such as Micheal Seibel, with access to a plethora of data, writes about the 5 things that will kill your startup after seed, I'm going to read it.
Gonz Sanchez takes a critical view of the current status of the European startup market. It is good to be reminded that we are still punching well below our weight.
Ending notes
Thank you for reading this far. Did you like this issue? Forward it to a friend or let me know by hitting reply. Remember, feedback loops are important to improve anything!
Have a great week,
N.
