Hello,

Welcome back to The Week in Italian Startups. This is Niccolò from Primo Ventures: every week I publish my curated list of the latest news from the Italian startup ecosystem.

The Money

• Aryel, an AR startup, raised €3m in a round led by Prana Ventures with the participation of several business angels.

• ABZero, a drone delivery startup, 🇮🇹raised €200k from business angels and crowdfunding.

• Aspire, a Singapore-based B2B fintech startup funded by two Italian entrepreneurs raised US$100m in a Series C round.

VC

• Panakes Partners 🇮🇹announced the final close of its Purple fund, at €175m.

• CDP Corporate Partners I, a “corporate VC” fund managed by CDP VC, reached €300m§, with the participation of Newlat and Terna as LPs.

• The European Investment Bank and 5 EU countries announced €3.75bn fund of funds to invest in VCs that back European scaleups.

Troubling signals

• Casavo announced a 30% reduction in its workforce.

• The Rock Trading, Italy’s oldest crypto exchange, 🇮🇹suspended trading and withdrawals, in a move that eerily resonates with similar cases in crypto (FTX?).

Reading this week

• Looking for new tools to solve specific tasks? There’s an AI for that.

• Crunchbase’s January recap: OpenAI raised a third of all funding in the world.

• Pitchbook released its European VC Valuations report for 2022.

Fundraising Tracker

Interviews from TechChill Milan 2022

During the last edition of TechChill Milan 2022, Giacomo and I interviewed a few friends. We are now releasing these videos, one per week: please enjoy our conversation with Cavalry Ventures’ Alessandra Mazzilli!

Ending Notes

Giacomo Mollo and I comment weekly on the latest news: subscribe to our podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcast, and other platforms to get additional insights on what is happening in the Italian ecosystem.

Have a great week,

N.