TWIS #302

MDOTM, Health Triage, Archimede, and others raised funding. A new fund from Panakes Partners. Bending Spoons and Alia Mentis went public. P101 acquired Prana Ventures.

Hello,

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

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The Money 💰

• MDOTM Ltd., a fintech startup, raised $27m in a Growth round from Expedition Growth Capital.

• Health Triage, a deep-tech startup, 🇮🇹raised €3m in a Early-Stage round from Vertis Sgr (Vertis Venture 6 Digital Sud), and Health 1.

• Archimede, a satellite connectivity and IoT startup,🇮🇹raised €1.5m in a Seed round from Primo Capital, Cdp Venture Capital, Plug and Play, Elis, 40Jemz Ventures, and Irritec.

• Banyan Biotech, a biotech startup, 🇮🇹raised €1m in a Seed round from Berrier Capital.

• Musthad, a circular economy startup, raised €1m in a Seed round from Alante Capital, Style IT, NextStep, and Ragnarson.

• Sencare, a health startup, raised €0.5m in a Seed round from Consis, Gama Partecipazioni, and Startup Bakery.

New funds💫

• Panakes Partners announced BII Catalyst Fund I for Italy, a biotech fund focused on Lazio-based biotech startups

IPO🪎

• Bending Spoons IPO prices above range at $18.4 billion valuation | Yahoo!Finance.

• Alia Mentis 🇮🇹went public on the Italian Stock Exchange.

M&A🥩

• Pirelli acquired a 24.99% in RideSense.

• iPratico 🇮🇹acquired Aivesp, a university spin-off from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna.

• P101 integrated Prana Ventures (and announced a new €100m seed fund).

Reading this week📚

• 16 new unicorns 🇮🇹minted in defence and spacetech in 2026 | Ilsole24ore.

• 🇮🇹Intacture, a 6 MW datacenter built inside a mine, 100mt underground.

• Hercle Secured MiCA and EMI Licenses, Bridging Regulated Cross-Border Payments and Stablecoin Settlement.

• The State of the AI Economy | Exponential View.

• The Venture Capitalist's World Model | Odin.

• The Palantirization of everything | A16z.

Jobs in Italian Startups🌟

If you want to share or more job positions relevant to the Italian ecosystem, fill out this form (note: fixed - it was offline for most of last week). Looking for a new job? Check out this link!

Startup Events in Italy🎪

Keep an eye on the upcoming events in the Italian ecosystem. Feel free to add an event through this form (note: fixed - it was offline for most of last week).

Fundraising Tracker 📈

Q2 in Italian Startups

A quick recap of the first two quarters:

1. My final number for the first 6 months of 2026 is almost EUR 730m.

2. The top 5 rounds were raised by four well established companies, and only one “AI-native” startup:

   1. D-Orbit (founded 2011, latest round EUR110m)

   2. Satispay (2013, 60m)

   3. Weroad (2017, 49.7m)

   4. Smartness (2020, 47m)

   5. Lexroom (2023, 43m)

3. Q2 was the most performant since my time series started - but it was the weakest on many previous years. Q3 and Q4 will be tough to match.

   

   The monthly chart draws a better picture than the aggregate data tells: 2025 had a great Q4, with almost 800m in new rounds announced. We are still a long way to go for the 1.5b mark!

   

4. Seed and pre-seed rounds account for the majority of stages (unsurprising).

You can navigate these and more charts on my streamlit dashboard.

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Ending Notes📝

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

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.

N.