TWIS #217

BizAway, Hlpy, Ephos, and others raised funding. Neva SGR announced two new funds. Liquid Factory. The Tech Europe Foundation.

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 💰

• BizAway, a traveltech company, raised €35m from Mayfair Equity Partners.

• Hlpy, a roadside assistance startup, 🇮🇹raised €18m in a round led by Nextalia SGR and Alkemia Capital, with previous investors The Techshop, CDP VC, and Simest joining the round.

• Ephos, a startup developing glass-based photonic circuits for quantum computing, raised $8.5m in a round led by Starlight.

• Young Platform, a crypto exchange, 🇮🇹raised €2.65m from Azimut.

• BHICA, a nutraceuticals startup, 🇮🇹raised €400k from business angels.

• Forte! and Contents.com raised undisclosed rounds.

• LIFTT led a GBP 2.5m round in UK-based Evolaris.

• Magicblock, a US-based but Italian-founded crypto startup, raised $3m in a pre-seed round led by A16Z.

New Funds 💫

• Neva SGR announced two new funds, Neva II and Neva II Italia, aiming to raise €500m in total.

• Fabrizio Capobianco announced Liquid Factory, a venture incubator.

• NextStep, NextEnergy Group’s VC fund, doubled its capital to €6.4m.

M&A 🥩

• TeamSystem acquired Distrito K.

Reading this week📚

• Fondazione Politecnico di Milano, Università Bocconi, ION and FSI established the Tech Europe Foundation. According to the announcement, there will be a €100 million fund to invest in start-ups based in its premises.

• Italy’s startup renaissance is taking shape.

• The Europe EdTech 200. 6% of the companies in the map come from Italy.

• iGenius 🇮🇹entered into a partnership with Banca Widiba.

• Cubbit 🇮🇹entered into a partnership with WIIT.

• Irene Mingozzi 🇮🇹joins Italian Founders Fund as Principal. Welcome back to Italy!

• A couple of readings that caught my eye:

  • while everybody is FOMO-ing on exploding numbers in terms of investment, capex, and adoption, here’s a contrarian view on Generative AI, The Subprime of AI;

  • There are commentators and operators foreseeing an upcoming shake-out in the market for venture capital funds: The Venture Apocalypse.

Watch / listen this week 🎧

• Scaling to Italy's SMB: Sibill’s Playbook for Fintech Growth - Momentum, the podcast.

• 🇮🇹The Rise of Satispay, from zero to 1 billion - video interview with Satispay’s cofounder Alberto Dalmasso (in Italian).

🌟Jobs in Italian Startups🌟

If you want to have one or more job positions relevant to the Italian ecosystem listed, fill out this form. The positions will remain visible for 30 days at this link.

Latest open positions:

• Product Manager at Qomodo

Startup Events in Italy🎪

Keep an eye on the upcoming events in the Italian ecosystem¹. Feel free to add an event through this form.

By the way, this week there is the Italian Tech Week, ping me if you are around.

---

Fundraising Tracker 📈

---

Ending Notes📝

Don’t forget to check out the TWIS dashboard for the latest updates.

I am experimenting with sponsorships in the newsletter. If you want to know more about sponsoring TWIS (and/or the podcast episodes), read some info here and send me a note!

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

Have a great week,

N.