TWIS #218

D-Orbit, Genespire, JetHR, Kleecks, and oh-so-many-others raised funding 🤩. New funds Mito Tech Ventures and Kyip Impact Mission announced. Carlo Tassi is the Italian Business Angel of the Year.

Sep 30, 2024

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.

It seems everyone waited for Italian Tech Week to announce their rounds: this was probably the week most packed with funding news since I started TWIS.

The Money 💰

D-Orbit, a spacetech company, 🇮🇹announced the completion of the Series C from December 2023. The company raised a total of €150m in the round.
Genespire, a biotech company, raised €46.6m in a round co-led by Sofinnova Partners, XGEN Venture and CDP Venture Capital forming a strong syndicate with Indaco SGR.
JetHR, a HR-tech startup, raised €12m in a round led by Picus Capital. Existing investors Exor, IFF, and 2100 participated in the round, alongside notable business angels.
Kleecks, a martech startup, 🇮🇹raised €6.5m in a round co-led by Blacksheep and Axon.
Vitesy, a consumer hardware startup focusing on food waste, raised €4m from CDP VC and Mediaset.
Mela Works, an ERP for the construction industry, 🇮🇹raised €2.4m from CDP VC and Terna Forward.
TrueScreen, a cybersecurity startup, raised €2.4m from Cysero.
Aptadir Therapeutics, a biotech startup, raised $1.6m in pre-seed funding from EXTEND.
Data Masters, an AI-focused tech academy, 🇮🇹raised €1.15m in a round led by Primo Ventures and participated by Zanichelli Venture and business angels.
Xbooks, a cryptotax startup, raised €1m from Primo Ventures.
Mapo Tapo, a traveltech startup, raised €1.15m in debt and equity from Zest, VeniSia, business angels, and others.
Sestre, a woman’s wellness startup, 🇮🇹raised €400k from TerraNext and the Fund for Female Entrepreneurship run by the Italian Ministry of Industry.
Raffaele Terrone’s new startup, UK-based Desia, raised $3.3m in a pre-seed round led by Dig Ventures.
ZCube 🇮🇹led a CAD$2m round in Canada-based Hyivy Health, a femtech startup.

New Funds 💫

Mito Tech Ventures, a new fund focused on net-zero transition, announced its first closing at €55m.
Kyip Capital 🇮🇹announced Kyip Impact Mission, a new PE impact fund, with a first closing of €30m.
The Lazio region 🇮🇹announced a new investment program in direct and fund-of-funds investments for a total of €75m.

M&A 🥩

Improovo 🇮🇹acquired Formatoriitaliani.it.

Reading this week📚

Carlo Tassi 🇮🇹named best Italian Business Angel of 2024.
An Innovup 🇮🇹study on the impact of startups on the Italian economy.

🌟Jobs in Italian Startups🌟

If you want to share or more job positions relevant to the Italian ecosystem, fill out this form. Looking for a new job? Check out this link!

Startup Events in Italy🎪

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

Fundraising Tracker 📈

Q3 is ending with an important uptick, with more than €300m in capital raised1, putting us on track to push the total above €1 billion by the end of the year (perhaps even €1.2B?). September was the second-best month in 2024 so far2, right after February, with more than €213m in rounds announced.

Looking at the absolute number of announced rounds, I added 145 deals to the tracker in the first 9 months of 2024, compared to 131 for the same period in 2023. That's a solid 10% increase in the number of announcements.

Ending Notes📝

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

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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,

Note: since D-Orbit announced a 100m Series C round back in December 2023, I am only accounting for the incremental 50m in the latest announcement.

Note: I bundle rounds by issue of the newsletter, not by the specific day of announcement - this might cause some misalignment at the end of each month or quarter when these happen mid week: in these cases, I’ll attribute the entire week to the following period.

The Week in Italian Startups