The week in Italian startups - Issue #41
The Money
Toothpic, a cybersecurity startup developing a solution for secure mobile-based authentication, raised €810k from Club Degli Investitori and Vertis SGR.
Newired, a user onboarding startup, 🇮🇹raised €1m in an international angel round.
Remat, a circular economy startup focused on recycling polyurethane foam from mattresses, 🇮🇹received an investment from IrenUp, the corporate venture capital program promoted by Iren, a utility company.
Cervellotik, an edtech startup, raised €160k in a seed round led by CDP Venture Capital.
Funds & fundraising
Intesa Group is one of the largest banking groups in Italy. Among its multiple activities, the group owns an investment company called Neva, the de facto corporate VC arm of Intesa, specializing in fintech investments (there are 6 publicly disclosed rounds). The news is that 🇮🇹 4 "banking foundations" invested €50m in Neva, growing the fund to almost €150m under management. Thanks to the new capital, the fund will evolve its strategy to bigger deals (fewer seed rounds, more growth rounds) and expanding outside of fintech.
Oltre Venture, an impact investments VC, 🇮🇹 announced its second fund, with funding already secured from EIF. The firm is raising €100m to continue investing in high-impact startups and to open an office in Spain.
Synergo Capital, a Milan-based asset manager specializing in private equity, 🇮🇹 announced the first close of its first venture capital fund, named Sinergia Venture Fund. The closing is at €30m and the fund will invest in software, AI, Robotics, IoT, etc...
Crowdfunding
Clubdealonline is a private equity-crowdfunding platform: to become an investor, you need to receive an invite or be accepted after a screening process. It recently 🇮🇹 announced the acquisition of iStarter, an Italian (but London-based) accelerator and network of angel investors, expanding its investors base.
Doorway, another "traditional" equity-crowdfunding platform, 🇮🇹 announced a partnership with IRTop Consulting, a firm specializing in capital markets and IPOs, to facilitate the public listing of crowdfunded startups.
Crowdfunding in Italy is definitely a thriving market.
Sustainable banking
Climate change may well be one of the main themes of this decade, and innovators against climate change are busy tackling it in various ways: carbon storage, food production & processing, new industrial processes, new energy sources... feel free to add your favorite.
On the other end of the spectrum, one issue with climate change is that for a single individual or family, assessing one's carbon footprint requires some effort. And without actual data, it's more difficult to take meaningful action.
Well, starting from now, bank customers will be able to know the carbon footprint of their consumption habits, right there in their banking statements: this will be made possible by the integration of Doconomy, a Swedish impact-tech startup, with the open banking platform developed by Fabrick, part of the Banca Sella group. Doconomy has built an index to calculate CO2 emissions for specific purchases, and Fabrick is in the perfect position to offer it to Italian banking institutions.
The implications of this can be quite interesting: retail banking products including incentive schemes to address carbon footprint? Climate-friendly governments subsidizing such banking products? I don't know, but interesting times ahead.
Action against climate change, one small credit card payment at a time.
Dall-E
The team at openAI trained their GPT-3 AI to create images from text descriptions. Fascinating.
That's all for this issue, stay safe and have a great week!
Nico
