TWIS #187
K-Sport World, Axyon AI, Doorway, and others raised funding. Exit for Sportclubby. Italian LLMs.
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.
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The Money 💰
K-Sport World, a sport-tech startup, raised €5m in a round led by Rialto VC.
Axyon AI, an AI fintech company, raised €3.9m in a round led by US-based VC firm Montage Ventures and accompanied by The Techshop SGR, alongside other angel investors.
Doorway, a crowdfunding platform, 🇮🇹raised €1.76m in fresh capital from CDP VC, Angels4Women, and other business angels.
Jampy, a startup developing products for pet wellness, raised €1m in a pre-seed round led by 360cp, alongside other business angels.
Volta Structural Energy, an energy storage startup, 🇮🇹raised €1m from Tech4Planet and Leonardo SpA.
Cellex, a medtech startup, 🇮🇹raised €830k from Innova Venture and business angels.
Weforguest, a travel-tech startup, 🇮🇹raised €500k in a pre-seed round from CDP VC, LVenture, and other investors. On top of that, the startup received €480k in debt instruments.
M&A 🥩
Playtomic 🇮🇹acquired Sportclubby.
Xenon Private Equity Small Cap 🇮🇹acquired a controlling stake in Kettydo+, Hic Mobile, and UrbiStat.
Italian LLMs 🤖🇮🇹
LLMs are finally speaking Italian! Two open-source models fine-tuned in the Italian language have been recently released:
LLaMAntino, released by a team from the University of Bari, is a fine-tuned version of LLaMa 2 (here is the paper, and of course, the models are available on HuggingFace in the 7b and 13b variants).
Zefiro is an LLM model fine-tuned to the Italian language based on Mistral 7b. The models are available on HuggingFace, on the author’s page.
But we have higher aspirations: Cineca and iGenius (an AI startup) 🇮🇹announced a partnership to create Modello Italia, a foundational LLM built from scratch. Will it stand against the big, deep-pocketed foundational LLM behemoths?
Reading this week 📚
An overview of the European space-tech ecosystem (spoiler: Italian funds are well represented at the seed stage).
IAG invested in Lombardstreet Ventures, strengthening the club's influence in the US.
Which Lombardia FinTech Startups Are Revolutionizing Italy's Finance Sector in 2023?
Data centers in Italy 🇮🇹might attract €15 billion in investments by 2025.
A tragic fire 🇮🇹burned down Planet Farms’ automated hydroponic farm.
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Ending Notes📝
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Have a great week,
N.
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