TWIS #202
TWIS #202
Futura, Loquis, Checksig, and others raised funding. M&A for JAKALA and others. 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.
The Money 💰
Futura, a Milan-based edtech startup, raised a €14m series A round from Eurazeo, United Ventures (already an investor), and Axon Partners Group.
Loquis, a travel podcasting startup, raised €3.78m from P101, Innova Venture, PiCampus, and CDP VC.
Checksig, a crypto custody and trading startup, 🇮🇹raised €2.7m from undisclosed investors.
J4ENERGY, a climate-tech startup, 🇮🇹raised €1m from RoboIT, Tech4Planet, and Pariter Robotics.
Wishew, a UK-based social network, 🇮🇹raised €10m from LMDV Capital.
M&A 🥩
NextUp 🇮🇹acquired Sweet Lilium → investment vehicles merging, a new quick way to enhance portfolio diversification? ;-)
JAKALA announced the acquisition of France-based ClaraVista.
Maticmind 🇮🇹acquired GDMS-Italy.
Reading this week 📚
An 🇮🇹interview with Giovanni Tesoriere, LIFTT’s CEO, about the investment firm future strategy.
Le Village by CA 🇮🇹opened a new office in Sicily.
The Status of Martech 2024 report. The supply of martech solutions is booming…
🇮🇹The 10 most promising AI startups in Italy. I am happy to see our portco Wordlift on the list!
✍🏻 Serena announced a new edition of the European SaaS Benchmark. Take part in the survey if you are a SaaS company.
The Data-driven VC Landscape 2024
The DDVC Landscape 2024 is live, with the latest insights into how data-driven VCs operate. Happy to be part of this vibrant community! 🤓
Italian LLMs
I am not surprised several researchers have released “Italian LLMs”. There are the tools, there is the academic interest, and at the end of the day, why not?
So far most contenders for the “Italian LLM” title were fine-tuned versions of popular open-source models (e.g. LLaMAntino, based on Llama 2; Zefiro, based on Mistral 7b). But as tech matures and costs plummet we are witnessing the release of models built from scratch.
While we wait for 🇮🇹Modello Italia, Sapienza University released Minerva, a family of LLMs built from scratch with the training set roughly half in Italian and half in English.
Two main considerations:
Minerva is the proof that training a model is only the starting point. One minute after the release, social conversations concentrated around all the biases and errors in responses → It makes one appreciate all the effort that big players put into fine-tuning their models (e.g. using RLHF and other techniques) and into creating anti-bias safeguards.
So far the release of these models is mostly a matter of universities or passionate users. As far as I know, the only company that announced a foundational model is iGenius with Modello Italia. And here I get to the issue of economic viability: I wonder whether (a) a LLM trained in Italian from the ground up would actually perform better than a LLM fine-tuned in Italian (I am wondering, e.g., whether there is a sufficient corpus of available data in Italian to train a >7B model), and (b) whether an Italian-first model would have a sufficient market to be a sustainable endeavor, outside of government use. The lack of commercial players proposing something similar is a clear signal, tbh.
I’m curious about what will happen with Modello Italia and its legacy. Let me know if you have any comments on the matter!
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Startup Events in Italy🎪
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Credito e Innovazione, le banche a supporto delle startup - Edizione 2024
ITALIAN INNOVATION ROADSHOW - Tappa Greentech & Meccatronica
Fundraising Tracker 📈
Ending Notes📝
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Have a great week,
N.
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