The week in Italian startups - Issue #83

The Money

• Energy Dome, an energy storage company, raised $11m from 360cp, Barclays, Novum Capital Partners, and Third Derivative.

• A2A, an Italian energy company, participated in the Energy Dome round, and 🇮🇹 also announced investments in Enspired and Beem Energy.

• Aindo, a startup developing a synthetic data generator for AI applications, raised €2.8m from Vertis SGR.

• Scuter, a sharing mobility startup, 🇮🇹 raised €3m in equity, debt, and grants.

• Twinone, a digital twin startup, raised a seed round from a syndicate of investors including Primo Ventures, Gellify, Azimut Digitech Fund, and Ratti SpA.

• ENI invested in a $1.8B round raised by Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a company developing a fusion reactor technology. ENI had initially invested in CFS in 2018.

IPOs, M&A, liquidity events

• Talent Garden acquired Hyper Island to scale its online education business.

• xFarm and Farm Technologies joined forces and created xFarm Technologies, an agritech player offering digital services to more than 80k farms and 1 million hectares.

• Datrix, an augmented analytics company, went public on the Euronext Growth market, raising €15m.

New investors in the block

• Kairos, an Italian asset management company controlled by Julius Bäer, a Swiss bank, launched a new VC fund aiming at raising €100m.

• SkyDeck, Berkeley's non-profit startup accelerator, is opening its first European branch in Milan.

• Nextalia is a PE firm, not a VC, but it's still worth reporting its new €500m fund focused on the Italian mid-market. They appointed a computer science professor in their industrial advisory panel.

Reading this week

• Osservatori del Politecnico di Milano published its 2021 research on capital raised by Italian startups. 🇮🇹 This article on StartupBusiness provides a good recap of the key facts. See the chart below to get a sense of 2021.📈🍷

To the moon!

• Micol Chiesa from Five Seasons Ventures reports from Cop26, noting a lack of VCs at such a key event.

Golden power

• The Italian government led by Mario Draghi already rebuffed three Chinese takeover attempts at Italian companies. The golden power is loaded and firing already.

A selection of positions published last week on XJobs

• Young Platform is looking for a Contabile

• Yolo is looking for a Technology Consultant Expert in the insurance market

• Wonderful Italy is looking for Responsabili acquisizione case

• Weschool is looking for a Learning Data Scientist

• Ventiseidieci is looking for an R&D Cosmetic Chemistry Intern

About XJobs:

• The XJobs platform is a free portal listing open job positions from the Italian startup ecosystem, managed by CDP Venture Capital. If you desire, you can apply for free and have your job positions posted on the platform by following this link.

Ending Notes

Join the Twitter Spaces conversation between Giacomo Mollo and myself commenting on the latest news, every Monday at 6:30 pm CET (follow us for a live reminder: Nico / Jack). If you miss the live discussion, you can subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and other podcast platforms.

Have a great week,

N.