The Money

• Shampora, a Rome-based startup selling tailor-made hair products,🇮🇹raised €3M from a syndicate of investors, including CDP Venture Capital, LVenture Group, and others.

• Busforfun.com, a commuting & mobility startup, 🇮🇹raised €500K from FNM [FNM.MI], the second largest train operator in Italy. FNM now owns 24.7% of the company.

M&A

• Alten Group [ATE.PA], a French firm operating in engineering, ICT, and technology consulting, acquired Milan-based SDG Group, a management consulting firm specialized in business analytics and corporate performance management. SDG employs 950 people. Price undisclosed.

• Mutuionline [MOL.MI], a group specialized in comparison services (including mortgages, insurance, and financial products), 🇮🇹acquired 100% of SOS Tariffe, an independent price comparison portal for consumer services such as communications and energy. Mutuionline paid €28.7M in an all-cash transaction, of which €3M in an earn-out agreement.

• Xingu, a startup offering a digital marketing platform for brands selling on Amazon, 🇮🇹was acquired by French company Labelium. Price undisclosed.

"Growth Leader 2021"

IlSole24Ore, a leading business newspaper, joined forces with Statista for the third time to create the list of the 450 fastest-growing small companies in Italy. The list ranks companies by revenues CAGR between 2016 and 2019. Note: the companies in the list applied to be evaluated by the committee, do not assume it is complete.

Everli teams-up with Metro Italy

Metro Italy teamed-up with Everli, a grocery delivery startup, to start offering delivery services to its customers. The interesting angle of the news is that Metro used to sell exclusively to businesses, but the Everli service is aimed at retail customers. Since most restaurants and horeca services have shutdown during this second wave of the pandemic, I guess it's a good time for Metro to try to diversify its customer base.

Another fintech heavyweight enters the Italian market

Stocard, the German startup that developed a mobile wallet with 50M users, launched Stocard Pay, a mobile payment solution, in France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands.

The capital behind the capital

In case you are in the process of raising a VC fund or you are just curious about the sentiment of European Limited Partners, you can download The capital behind venture report, featuring interviews and feedback from about 63 LPs. It appears they favor track record, some have specific KPIs (diversity, ESG), and that a big chunk of VCs' capital comes from public sources.

Roblox and other IPOs

Quite a few US companies have been filing for IPOs in recent weeks (Airbnb, DoorDash, Affirm, Palantir...). You can find plenty of info about them. But one stands out: Roblox is probably not as famous as its brethren, but it is an incredible gaming & co-creation platform nonetheless. And its numbers are 🤯. This tweetstorm provides a good overview of the relevant figures and of the Roblox model:

Growf @pinchedforgrowf

Did a tour through the RBLX S1, and couldn’t resist jotting down what I learned about an amazing business and company that I think is among the most interesting in gaming: (1/x)

8:43 PM ∙ Jan 18, 2023

Ending notes

After last week's news bonanza, this one was relatively quiet.

As you may have noticed, I decided to stop adding links to Crunchbase - it continues to be my go-to portal for a quick search, but it takes time to add the links, and the click-through rate on them is low. Let me know if it was something important to you.

Thank you for getting to the end.

Take care,

Nico