The week in Italian startups - Issue #29

The Money

• Milan-based Faire.ai, an open banking startup specializing in consumer credit automation, 🇮🇹 raised €1.5M from Banca Progetto.

• IUSCAPTO, a Genova-based AI startup, 🇮🇹received an investment from 4ward, LCA Ventures, and Xenon Private Equity. The amount of the investment is undisclosed.

• Chitè, a made-to-order lingerie e-commerce, 🇮🇹raised €830K from AVM Gestioni SGR Spa [cb] and a group of business angels.

• Invictus Capital 🇮🇹invested in Entire Digital, an AI-driven publishing startup boasting hundreds of thousands of readers across its media outlets. The amount of the investment is undisclosed but the company is currently raising €3M in a round opened a few months back.

• CDP Venture Capital 🇮🇹 invested ~€1M in three startups that emerged from Elteide, a technology hub in Caserta. The startups are Keelt, a watch marketplace, IEM, a business intelligence platform for e-commerce, and Mazer, the developer of Laila, a chatbot platform.

• Trendevice will 🇮🇹launch its IPO later this month. The startup sells refurbished high-end devices and raised €440K in a crowdfunding campaign in 2019. According to the news, it will list on the AIM (the "junior" Italian market), 🇮🇹looking to raise €3M. This is not the first IPO by a startup that raised funding from the crowd - 🇮🇹 Cleanbnb IPO'ed last year raising a little less than €4M.

M&A

• Piteco [PITE.MI], a software house specializing in corporate treasury and financial planning management solutions, acquired 70% of RAD informatica, specializing in debt recovery software, paying €35M in the transaction. RAD Informatica reported €10.3M in revenues in the twelve months jul '19 - jun '20, according to a statement by Klecha&Co, advisor in the operation.

Fintech partnerships across borders

• French fintech Qonto [cb] 🇮🇹 partnered with Italian on-demand insuretech YOLO [cb] to offer two insurance products dedicated to Italian SMBs. (disclaimer: YOLO is a Primomiglio portfolio company).

European VC fundraising in Q3

• Another quarter is behind us, and @yanroux and @stefanobernardi are back with their quarterly update about European VC fundraising. Read all about it here.

European Accelerators and Incubators

• Next Tuesday (20 Oct) the Social Innovation Monitor will present the results of its research on incubators and accelerators in Europe. France is the country hosting more incubators, while Italy has the lowest number. More info on the official website.

GPT-3

• GPT-3 is back as well. This time, someone released a GPT-3 bot on /r/AskReddit. The news is that the bot was caught because it was posting too frequently, too fast, not because of suspicious content. Some of the interactions are pretty astonishing: you can read them in the linked post.

Breaking into VC

• Pietro Invernizzi from Stride.vc published his guide to breaking into VC. Pietro put together a considerably large collection of content and suggestions, definitely worth a read if you are interested.

Ending notes

Thank you for reading this far. As usual, feel free to hit reply to send comments, feedback, or news to share in the next issue.

Have a great week,

Nico