The Week in Italian Startup

Giacomo Mollo
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The Week in Italian Startup discusses and analyzes the latest news from the Italian startup ecosystem. Giacomo Mollo is a former academic in philosophy turned tech investor. He is co-founder and partner of iN3 Ventures, a corporate innovation and VC firm. Niccolò Sanarico is an Oxford MBA and a software engineer with a passion for innovation and startups. He is currently an Investment Manager at Primo Ventures SGR, a venture capital firm based in Italy.

  1. 6d ago

    Newcleo's Nasdaq Debut: Only $31M of a $209M SPAC Showed Up. Here's Why That's Fine #214

    Newcleo went public on Nasdaq via a SPAC merger with NewHold on September 22, raising $247M — but only $31M came from the SPAC's roughly $209M trust account, and $216M came from the PIPE. The press read the debut as bumpy, pointing at a -17% move at the open; we explain why that misreads how SPACs work. A SPAC is a listed cash box that raises money before it has a business, and its shareholders can redeem their shares before the merger closes — on average around 50% of them do. Many enter planning to leave at the listing: they earn T-bill interest on the trust and keep warrants to buy shares later at a fixed price, often $11.50. The PIPE is different: new investors committed at $10 a share with no redemption right, which makes it the real signal of confidence in the deal. We also cover why Newcleo chose Nasdaq over Borsa Italiana, where a more risk-tolerant investor pool is used to financing cutting-edge technology that loses money for years, and why over $1B raised since 2021 is only the beginning next to a MOX fuel plant estimated at about $2.4B. Then Tundr's €11.6M Series A, with Crédit Agricole Italia and Sella Direct Ventures on a cap table that could become a distribution network, if it turns into commercial deals. Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/ Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomollo Listen to all episodes on audio: Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQ Google Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RC Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3Elhykq Amazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9 Get in touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxx Twitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomollo Email: giacomo@in3.ventures #venturecapital #italy #startup

  2. Sep 22

    Exein Hits $1.7B: Italy Built a Unicorn #213

    Exein raised $270M at a $1.7B valuation — roughly €234m at about €1.45bn — making it Italy's newest unicorn in embedded IoT and firmware cybersecurity, with no Italian investor named in the round. We track the climb: a €70M Series C led by Balderton in July 2025 above €350M, then €100M in December 2025 split roughly half equity and half debt with the equity led by Blue Cloud Ventures near €700M, and now a round that doubles the price again. Niccolò Sanarico calls it what it is: an overnight success, ten years in the making. The product sits inside the firmware manufacturers ship — industrial machines, cameras, robots, budget Android phones — under an open-core model where chipmakers embed it free, paid conversion runs near 10%, and the unpaid majority becomes telemetry for a security foundation model trained on two years of data from more than two billion devices. The harder question is the capital: Italy started this company, United Ventures backed it first, and international investors made it a unicorn, because no fund in Italy writes a €200M check into a single startup. We go through the pool — Goldman Sachs, a telecom CVC, KfW, and the European Investment Bank through the European Tech Champions Initiative — and the EU Cyber Resilience Act, whose reporting obligations started September 11, 2026, one week before the announcement, with the main requirements from December 11, 2027. From there it's the Asian supply chain, where MediaTek chips put Exein into smart TVs, Wi-Fi routers, Chromebooks and voice assistants, and European regulation gets exported as demand into Asian manufacturing. We close on physical AI, where a compromised robot on a factory floor has a far wider blast radius than a compromised fridge, and on Primo Capital's new Primo Biotech Lazio fund for early-stage life sciences. Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/ Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomollo Listen to all episodes on audio: Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQ Google Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RC Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3Elhykq Amazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9 Get in touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxx Twitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomollo Email: giacomo@in3.ventures #venturecapital #italy #startup

  3. Sep 15

    Miro Sold at 90% Off to Bending Spoons. The Sellers Reinvested $295M. #212

    Bending Spoons is buying Miro for $1.355B in enterprise value, all cash, roughly 90% below Miro's $17.5B valuation from January 2022, and some Miro shareholders are reinvesting $295M of their payout into newly issued Bending Spoons shares. Giacomo reads that as a hedge on Bending Spoons' operations; Niccolò Sanarico suggests it may simply have been a condition to close the deal. On paper Miro is a stellar business: about $600M in ARR, 250,000 organizations, around 90% of revenue from businesses and more than 750 customers paying over $100K a year, sold at roughly 2.3x ARR. We look at why Miro breaks Bending Spoons' nostalgia-brand pattern and how AI restructuring, with acquired products running on a shared stack for auth, payments, A/B testing, analytics and AI inference, makes the model work. The counterforce is that AI also shrinks the seats enterprise clients buy, and Niccolò argues these are times for building, not dismantling. Then the bigger question for European venture: is Europe's software edge consolidation rather than invention? We also cover Exein's $270M round at a $1.7B valuation as the EU Cyber Resilience Act's reporting obligations begin, and Cato's €6M seed for AI on public tenders. Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/ Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomollo Listen to all episodes on audio: Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQ Google Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RC Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3Elhykq Amazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9 Get in touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxx Twitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomollo Email: giacomo@in3.ventures #venturecapital #italy #startup

  4. Sep 10

    Europe's Biggest AI Round Is Mostly Debt #211

    Domyn, Europe's largest AI round, is mostly debt: $1.1B raised, roughly 90% of it borrowed against 6,000 Nvidia chips in southern Italy, leaving an equity cheque of about $110M. That structure is the episode. A deal that began as a substantial Series A in 2024–25 became infrastructure financing, and Niccolò Sanarico's read is blunt: this is not pure-play venture capital, it is another beast. From there we split AI sovereignty into its real layers — where data sits, who controls the model, who operates the system, and who supplies replacement hardware — with Domyn as the hybrid case, training locally on a supply chain it does not own. We test the commercial question underneath: is there a market for companies that want their own model, fully localised, trained on proprietary data, and what does that cost you when a competitor runs on a frontier model instead. The OpenAI mathematics episode gets at why the demand exists anyway, because the doubt about data safety is enough. We also cover Tensive, an Italian biotech in biomaterials, which took €20M from the European Investment Bank as a convertible loan in two tranches on a 20-year maturity, roughly double the venture-debt horizon. And Foorban, the Milan food startup that reached operational break-even with more than 500 customers and 800 smart fridges, raising €7.2M from IMPACT Partners in a round that also bought out some existing shareholders. Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/ Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomollo Listen to all episodes on audio: Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQ Google Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RC Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3Elhykq Amazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9 Get in touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxx Twitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomollo Email: giacomo@in3.ventures #venturecapital #italy #startup

  5. Jul 28

    Fewer startups, bigger cheques - H1 2026 in Italian Venture Capital #210

    Italian startup funding in H1 2026 came in at €679M according to VeM and €813M according to Growth Capital — two official venture capital reports on the same six months, €134M apart, and both correct. Giacomo Mollo and Niccolò Sanarico break down why the two observatories count differently: VeM tracks institutional, tech-transfer-heavy activity in Italian-incorporated companies and classifies it in traditional private equity categories, while Growth Capital, co-authored with Italian Tech Alliance, uses modern vertical segmentation and includes large rounds and deals done outside Italy. Both agree on the figure neither headlined: first-time cheques fell from 110 to 95, so the money went up while the number of companies funded went down. The episode sets Italy against Europe's €44bn across 5,330 rounds and asks why a market this size still lands where it does. It covers the 59% pre-seed and seed skew, why Niccolò says Italy doesn't yet have a true barbell, and the business-angel tax incentive that expired at the start of the year. It looks at what actually absorbed the capital — Weroad, Smartness, Lexroom and Niulinx — and why the record half was carried by applied and vertical software rather than the deeptech and biomedical deals Italy has historically pushed. The conversation closes on two rounds: Circular Materials' €11.8M SAFE from CDP Venture Capital, the EIC Fund, EIT RawMaterials and 360 Capital, built on an End-of-Waste licence very few holders have, and ORiS' €5M pre-seed led by Earlybird, a German fund taking the lead position on a Politecnico di Torino spinout.Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomolloListen to all episodes on audio:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQGoogle Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RCApple Podcast: https://apple.co/3ElhykqAmazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9Get in touch:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxxTwitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomolloEmail: giacomo@in3.ventures#venturecapital #italy #startup

  6. Jul 14

    Europe's €2.4 billion fusion champion is built by Italians on German Tech #209

    Proxima Fusion, nuclear fusion, stellarator technology, Italian founders and CDP Venture Capital anchor this episode on Europe's largest fusion round ever: €411M at a €2.4 billion valuation. The Max Planck Institute spin-out is headquartered in Munich, will likely build its first plant in Bavaria, and counts Google, RWE, KfW Capital, SPRIND and quant-finance investors among ~21 backers — with Italy's CDP re-upping as a returning investor. A €2.4B valuation for a company with zero revenue and a demonstrator by 2030 means fusion has been re-priced from science risk to execution risk. Italy is hedging the race across competing technologies: CDP backs Proxima's stellarator while Eni has been one of the largest investors in Commonwealth Fusion Systems' tokamak since 2018. Then Young Platform, the Italian crypto exchange, raises €22.5M in a growth round from Azimut — a bet on regulation rather than hype, with MiCAR authorization covering 8 of 10 crypto services, first in Italy by breadth, in a market that has clearly cooled off. Finally, Primo Capital launches Primo Space Fund 2 with a €120M target for space technology and dual-use applications, €70M+ in expressions of interest before first close and Roberto Battiston advising. The through-line: Italy didn't miss the fusion race — it paid to be on the sidelines.Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomolloListen to all episodes on audio:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQGoogle Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RCApple Podcast: https://apple.co/3ElhykqAmazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9Get in touch:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxxTwitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomolloEmail: giacomo@in3.ventures#venturecapital #italy #startup

  7. Jul 7

    What Italy's €730M VC Funding Number Hides #208

    Italian startup funding, venture capital, D-Orbit, Satispay, WeRoad, CDP and the dealflowit H1 2026 data anchor this episode on why Italy's ~€730M half-year is concentration, not depth. The top three rounds account for roughly 40% of the total and the top five for about 60%, so stripping out the breakouts leaves an ordinary half. The most active investor isn't a private VC — it's CDP, the state, with 91 investments — while business angels stay busy at pre-seed and the biggest checks at the top come increasingly from foreign players like Airbnb, which led WeRoad. We put €730M in context: it's roughly half Italy's ~€1.5–1.6B annual ceiling, and 2025 leaned on an exceptional ~€800M fourth quarter, so the back half of 2026 has a steep bar. We also note that only one top name, Lexroom, is AI-native, and that rising average round sizes (Series C near €46M) signal a maturing but still-shallow market. Then MDOTM: a $27M growth round from Expedition Growth Capital, with its Sphere platform already touching $100B+ in assets across 60+ institutions including Morgan Stanley, Amundi and Zurich Bank. Finally Alia Mentis, a 2012 advanced-composites maker, debuts on Euronext Growth Milan up 35% on day one, oversubscribed, on about €15M revenue and €8.5M EBITDA — a 58% margin — with a founder who kept 67% after a mostly bootstrapped path. The through-line: Italy didn't have a record half-year — three companies did.Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomolloListen to all episodes on audio:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQGoogle Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RCApple Podcast: https://apple.co/3ElhykqAmazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9Get in touch:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxxTwitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomolloEmail: giacomo@in3.ventures#venturecapital #italy #startup

  8. Jun 30

    Google Built Search for Humans. Seltz Builds It for AI #207

    AI agent search, agentic web search, and the retrieval layer take center stage as Seltz raises a €12.5M seed to rebuild search for AI agents rather than humans. Founder Antonio Mallia — NYU PhD in information retrieval, ex-Amazon AGI, ex-Pinecone — argues agents fire hundreds of precise queries in parallel and need machine-readable passages in under 200 milliseconds, not ten blue links. We discuss why Seltz takes the harder bet of owning the crawler, index, and retrieval layer instead of orchestrating on top of existing indexes. We unpack the cap table — Speedinvest, B Capital, Italian Founders Fund, United Ventures, and Bain's Future Back Ventures — and what it signals about global ambition with an Italian-founder backbone. We look at a category already minting unicorns: Tavily acquired for up to $400M, Parallel at a ~$2B valuation, Exa at $85M, and ask whether this is the first search era with no winner-takes-all. Then two Italian €3.2M rounds — Compri in AI procurement and Kalipso in regtech — frame the shift from SaaS to "software as labor," where buyers purchase outcomes instead of tools. It's a look at where search, agents, and "boring AI" workflows are heading next.Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomolloListen to all episodes on audio:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQGoogle Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RCApple Podcast: https://apple.co/3ElhykqAmazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9Get in touch:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxxTwitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomolloEmail: giacomo@in3.ventures#venturecapital #italy #startup

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The Week in Italian Startup discusses and analyzes the latest news from the Italian startup ecosystem. Giacomo Mollo is a former academic in philosophy turned tech investor. He is co-founder and partner of iN3 Ventures, a corporate innovation and VC firm. Niccolò Sanarico is an Oxford MBA and a software engineer with a passion for innovation and startups. He is currently an Investment Manager at Primo Ventures SGR, a venture capital firm based in Italy.

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