The most visible technology stories tend to happen at the surface: the new product we can try, the interface we can see, the answer that appears in seconds. But many of the most consequential changes are happening underneath.

The infrastructure of technology is being rebuilt for a world in which intelligence is no longer confined to a screen. It retrieves information, identifies threats, helps interpret complex biological signals, operates businesses, programs quantum computers, and increasingly acts in the physical world.

Over the past months, we have backed six companies working across these layers. They are very different businesses, spanning cybersecurity, search, quantum software, hospitality, preventive health, and robotics. What connects them is a willingness to rethink the foundations of their industries, rather than simply add AI to systems designed for another era.

Alongside these investments, we have seen a major scientific milestone from Algorithmiq, welcomed new perspectives to our team, and spent time with builders from Rome to San Francisco.

Here are a few signals from the frontlines of technology, and why we think they matter.

✨ portfolio highlights ✨

Beelzebub: defending at machine speed

For most of computing history, attackers and defenders operated under roughly the same constraint: human speed. AI has broken that symmetry. A single operator can now run attacks in parallel, adapt techniques rapidly, and exploit vulnerabilities faster than a human security team can respond.

This is the problem Beelzebub was created to solve. We led the Milan-based company’s €3 million seed round, backing founder Mario Candela and his vision for an AI-native security platform built around an assumed-breach model.

Rather than relying solely on a perimeter, Beelzebub fills infrastructure with intelligent decoys that behave like real production systems. When attackers move inside the network, those decoys draw them into the open. The platform then isolates compromised systems and analyzes captured payloads, turning what would ordinarily be an intrusion into live threat intelligence.

Beelzebub began as an open-source research project and is now building a research-led security company from Italy, with plans to expand its presence in Rome and San Francisco. As attacks move at machine speed, we believe defense must move at the same speed.

Read why we backed Beelzebub

Seltz: rebuilding search for agents

The web and the search engines that organize it were built for people. AI agents consume information differently: they run many queries in sequence, retrieve and compare structured facts, and need results that are fast, fresh, and citable.

Most AI search products still depend on results ranked for human clicks. Seltz chose the harder path. Founded by Antonio Mallia, the company owns and operates the entire retrieval stack, from crawling and knowledge extraction to indexing, retrieval, and ranking.

We joined Seltz’s $12.5 million seed round, led by Speedinvest and B Capital, because we believe this architectural independence will matter more as agents move from experiments to production. Seltz has already indexed more than 500 million web pages, while its first public benchmark reported 89% retrieval accuracy at 166 milliseconds end-to-end.

Antonio began his training in information retrieval at the University of Pisa, then completed a PhD at NYU and worked on search infrastructure at Bloomberg, Amazon, and Pinecone. Today, he is building from San Francisco while maintaining meaningful research and engineering roots across Italy and Europe.

Read why we backed Seltz

Plus: Fabio Savelli spoke with Seltz founder and CEO Antonio Mallia for Corriere della Sera about his journey from Pisa to Silicon Valley and his ambition to build the web-retrieval infrastructure AI agents need.

Algorithmiq: from quantum promise to trusted computation

Quantum computing has long been dominated by the hardware race. Yet more qubits alone do not make a quantum computer useful. The critical layer is the software that can extract reliable answers from noisy machines and apply them to meaningful scientific problems.

That is the layer Algorithmiq is building. In May, we led the company’s €18 million round to support its quantum algorithms, error-mitigation technology, and applications across chemistry and life sciences. The company also moved its global headquarters from Helsinki to Milan, creating a new destination for scientific and engineering talent in Europe.

Then, in July, Algorithmiq and IBM announced a joint demonstration of quantum advantage using a simulation of heterogeneous quantum matter. Eight months after the problem was first published on the open Quantum Advantage Tracker, leading classical approaches had still not reliably reproduced results across the full regime studied. Just as importantly, the teams developed a framework for establishing trust in quantum results when classical verification is no longer available.

This is not the end of the debate around quantum advantage. It is the kind of openly testable scientific milestone that advances the field. Algorithmiq has also released its strongest classical method as an open-source benchmark, inviting researchers to challenge the result rather than take it on faith.

Read why we backed Algorithmiq and explore the quantum milestone

Plus: Algorithmiq co-founder and CEO Sabrina Maniscalco joined Eleonora Chioda for Corriere della Sera’s “MeravigliosaMente” to discuss her return to Italy and why the country has the talent to become a global hub for quantum technology.

Smartness: when software starts doing the work

For decades, business software has presented information and organized workflows, while leaving people responsible for every decision and action. AI is beginning to change that division of labor.

We led Smartness’ €47 million Series B alongside CDP Venture Capital, with participation from existing investor Partech, to support the company as it builds an agentic operating system for European hospitality. Its platform helps independent hotels manage pricing, property operations, guest communication, CRM, upselling, and payments, with software increasingly able to execute tasks rather than simply recommend them.

Founded in Trentino by Luca Rodella, Eugenio Bancaro, and Tommaso Centonze, Smartness now serves more than 5,000 customers across 41 countries. The new capital will accelerate international expansion, hiring, product development, and a deliberate M&A strategy to build a European category leader.

Read more about Smartness

Qura: connecting the fragments of preventive health

Healthcare is highly effective at responding when something is acutely wrong. It is often less effective at helping people make sense of persistent symptoms, disconnected tests, and health concerns that do not yet amount to a formal diagnosis.

Qura is building a longitudinal health platform designed to connect those fragments. Members begin with comprehensive blood testing, which is combined with symptoms and lifestyle information through an AI-supported health-mapping system. A licensed physician reviews every analysis, followed by a personalized consultation and plan, with periodic testing to track changes over time.

We led Qura’s €1.5 million pre-seed round, alongside Vento and Italian Angels for Growth, backing founders Virginia Gambardella and Gioacchino Grand. Their approach keeps doctors at the center of the experience while using technology to make clinical interpretation more continuous, personalized, and scalable.

Read why we invested in Qura

Cyberwave: giving AI a bridge to the physical world

AI has become increasingly capable of reasoning, planning, and understanding context. A harder problem remains: enabling that intelligence to act reliably in the physical world.

Cyberwave is building the operating layer between AI agents and machines. Its platform connects robots, AI models, and enterprise systems through a common orchestration and control layer, reducing the custom engineering traditionally required to deploy and scale industrial automation.

We led Cyberwave’s €7 million round alongside The TechShop, Vento, Pi Campus, and a group of angel investors. Founders Simone Di Somma, Vittorio Banfi, and Max Lungarella are building the company across Milan, Zurich, and San Francisco, combining proximity to European manufacturing with deep robotics expertise and the velocity of the global AI ecosystem.

The opportunity is not simply to make individual robots more intelligent. It is to make the physical world programmable.

Read why we invested in Cyberwave

💡 in the conversation 💡

The economics of AI face a reckoning

In La Repubblica, Federico Ferrazza examines the widening gap between the vast sums being invested in AI and the revenues the technology is generating. Falling model prices, mounting infrastructure costs, and intensifying Chinese competition are raising questions about the sector’s long-term economics.

Massimiliano Magrini argues that AI’s short-term impact was probably overestimated, while the capital required to support its computing infrastructure remains enormous. This gives cash-generative players such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet an advantage over AI-native companies still dependent on private funding. He also highlights a less discussed consequence: if AI reduces the value of some forms of work and shrinks the tax base, governments may eventually need to shift more of the fiscal burden toward the energy production powering AI infrastructure.

Read the article in La Repubblica

Talent is not the constraint. Scale is.

In an analysis for Corriere della Sera, Federico Fubini examined the widening gap between Europe’s emerging technology clusters and Italy’s ability to finance its own innovation.

As Massimiliano Magrini argued in the piece, Italy’s startups do not lack talent or technological depth. The constraint is scale: the ability to attract capital, grow rapidly, and become companies that can compete globally. Closing that gap requires a more complete venture capital infrastructure, particularly at the growth stage, where promising companies either become European champions or are pulled toward better-capitalized ecosystems elsewhere.

Read the article in Corriere della Sera

What the Musk and OpenAI dispute really tells us

Massimiliano joined Luca Salvioli on Tecno, the technology podcast from Il Sole 24 Ore, to look beyond the courtroom framing of the Musk and OpenAI dispute.

Their conversation explored competition and power in generative AI, the limits of regulating technology before its effects are fully understood, and why the market is unlikely to become a simple winner-takes-all contest. They also discussed the growing strategic value of data and how companies such as Anthropic are building trust through an explicit relationship between technology, responsibility, and values.

Listen to the episode on Spotify

More than a decade of founder-investor partnership

What does a founder-investor relationship look like after more than ten years?

Our co-founder Paolo Gesess joined Moneyfarm co-founder and CEO Giovanni Daprà on the EUVC Podcast to discuss the company’s evolution from a Milan startup into a pan-European wealth-management platform with €7 billion in assets under management.

The conversation goes beyond the usual fundraising and growth story. Paolo and Giovanni discuss shifting to profitability during the interest-rate shock, building M&A capabilities, managing a cap table with venture, private equity, and strategic investors, and why disciplined growth can create more durable value than importing a Silicon Valley playbook. They also address a subject rarely discussed openly: patience, liquidity, and how investors manage successful long-term holdings.

Listen to the EUVC Podcast

👋 News from the Team 👋

Welcome, Nezahat!

We recently welcomed Nezahat Gultekin to United Ventures as Strategic Advisor.

Nezahat brings more than two decades of experience across technology, capital, and corporate strategy in Silicon Valley, Europe, and emerging markets. She has seen how companies are built from nearly every seat at the table, as an investment banker, principal investor, business builder, and board director.

She joins us as we strengthen our international reach and support founders whose ambitions extend well beyond their home markets. She believes internationalization today is less about geographic footprint and more about connectivity: access to capital, talent, customers, and the conviction required to scale globally.

To mark her arrival, we asked Nezahat about company-building, global scale, and where European technology goes next.

Read the conversation with Nezahat

Matteo Moscarelli named to Forbes Under 30 Italy

Congratulations to our Principal Matteo Moscarelli, who was recognized in the Finance category of the 2026 Forbes Under 30 Italy list.

Matteo works with founders across deep tech, fintech, and AI, bringing an international perspective and the empathy of someone who has experienced the startup journey from both sides. In a recent conversation with ESCP, he reflected on why venture capital remains a people business, what he looks for in exceptional founders, and why Europe must build its own capabilities across sovereign AI, robotics, and quantum technology.

In Matteo’s words, it is still “day zero.” We are delighted to see his work recognized and even more excited about what comes next.

Read Matteo’s interview with ESCP

📚 one book to read 📚

Rejection, by Tony Tulathimutte

Profoundly disturbing and unmistakably contemporary, Rejection explores some of our deepest emotions and the ways digital life is transforming how we see ourselves and relate to one another. Its interconnected stories are gross, darkly funny, virtuosic, and saturated with internet language.

What stayed with me most is its reflection on the risks of delegating judgment, whether to platforms, algorithms, or the crowd. Few books capture the compulsive anxiety, alienation, and moral confusion of our doomscrolling age so precisely.

That’s all for today!

We hope August gave you some room for rest, curiosity, and the kind of unstructured thinking from which the best ideas often emerge. We will be back soon with more news from across the United Ventures portfolio and the European technology ecosystem.

Thank you for reading, and enjoy the end of summer ❤️

The United Ventures team

P.S. If you enjoyed this newsletter, feel free to forward it to someone who might find it interesting. You can also subscribe here and follow United Ventures on LinkedIn for more updates.

To mark this important milestone, Jacopo Drudi, the United Ventures Partner working closely with Algorithmiq, reflects on the rapid evolution of quantum computing, why companies should start preparing now, and the role software infrastructure will play in bringing the technology into real-world use.

Read the official announcement from IBM and Algorithmiq

For years, quantum technologies remained a subject for theoretical physicists, research laboratories and academic conferences. Something that belonged more to a distant future than to the corporate strategies of the present or near future.

And yet, something is moving, much faster than non-experts might have expected.

In recent months, the change has been radical. From being primarily the focus of researchers and institutions, quantum computing has forcefully entered the strategic agendas of companies and countries, with Italy willing, and rightly able, to play a leading role. Its potential is also becoming increasingly intertwined with the spread of artificial intelligence.

As always, numbers and facts tell the story of this transition better than words.

McKinsey’s Quantum Technology Monitor 2026 counts more than 300 organizations worldwide actively collaborating with quantum technology providers, from Airbus to Boehringer Ingelheim, JPMorgan Chase and Liberty Mutual. It estimates a potential economic value of up to $2.7 trillion by 2035.

The State of Quantum 2026, a report published in June by IQM Quantum Computers and produced in partnership with The Quantum Insider, captures just as clearly the stage we are at today. Eighty-nine per cent of the organizations surveyed are already working concretely with quantum technologies, but only 3 percent have reached deployment at scale.

Governments are moving in the same direction.

In May, the US Department of Commerce announced nine letters of intent to provide more than $2 billion in incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act. The planned funding covers IBM, GlobalFoundries, D-Wave, Rigetti, Quantinuum and four other quantum companies, with the government receiving minority, non-controlling equity stakes as a condition of the incentives. Meanwhile, Congress is working on the proposed National Quantum Initiative Reauthorization Act of 2026.

The same momentum can be seen in the capital markets. 2026 has become a landmark year for the sector, with Infleqtion, Xanadu, IQM and Quantinuum going public through SPAC transactions or traditional IPOs, while Pasqal has announced plans to follow later in the year. These transactions have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and in Quantinuum’s case, $1.68 billion through its IPO.

The acceleration of recent months is now receiving a further push.

Last November, IBM, together with the Flatiron Institute, BlueQubit and Algorithmiq, contributed to the launch of the Quantum Advantage Tracker. It is an open, community-led registry where potential demonstrations of quantum computing’s superiority over classical computing are published, compared against the leading classical methods and continuously tested by the scientific community.

IBM had never previously made a statement about achieving quantum advantage. Today, it has done so jointly with Algorithmiq, the Italian start-up led by Sabrina Maniscalco in which United Ventures invested with conviction earlier this year.

The result is a joint demonstration of quantum advantage in the simulation of heterogeneous quantum matter, together with a framework for establishing the reliability of a quantum computation when direct classical verification is no longer available. Eight months after the problem first appeared on the Quantum Advantage Tracker, no classical method has been able to reproduce the results reliably across the full regime examined.

We have therefore officially entered the phase of building capabilities, including talent, integration and proprietary know-how, which precedes widespread adoption. It is precisely during this phase that tomorrow’s advantage is being built today.

Quantum computing will arrive, and it will do so sooner and more disruptively than many expect. Its impact will initially be felt in sectors including pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, logistics and defense, making possible tasks that are not even imaginable for today’s computers using classical models.

Companies that choose to wait, without actively shaping their own quantum future, do not simply risk falling behind. They risk being pushed out of the market without even realizing it.

Few people can predict exactly what a quantum computer will be capable of. Starting to test selected use cases now and validating early assumptions is the best way to prepare for the challenge of the near future.

In this scenario, the team led by founders Sabrina Maniscalco, Guillermo García-Pérez, Matteo Rossi and Boris Sokolov aims to make Algorithmiq the software infrastructure layer for quantum computers.

The company is building a platform that is agnostic in terms of both sector and hardware, with concrete and effective use cases already emerging today. When the hype gives way to real and more widespread adoption, it will once again be the software infrastructure that determines who wins the hardware race.

This is exactly the kind of bet United Ventures is willing to make. Providing risk capital to exceptional teams capable of turning science into enterprise through unique and distinctive technologies, and of building Europe’s next global technology champion.

Further reading

IBM and Algorithmiq demonstrate quantum advantage and establish a framework for trusted quantum computation beyond classical verification

🗞️ Read the official press release

⚛️ Read the research paper

About the author

Jacopo Drudi is a Partner at United Ventures and works closely with Algorithmiq. He invests in and supports technology companies operating at the intersection of deep tech, software, and industrial transformation.

Subscribe now

In December 2025, a Docker server sat exposed on the open internet — the kind of misconfigured, forgotten box that automated tools scan for and hit thousands of times a day. One of the year’s most aggressive campaigns found it within hours and moved in. It was a trap: the server was a Beelzebub decoy.

Rather than simply record the intrusion, Beelzebub’s researchers traced the campaign back to its command-and-control server — whose operational metrics had been left publicly accessible — and published its own figures in their research, Operation PCPcat. A group calling itself Team PCP had scanned more than 91,000 targets in 33 hours and compromised over 59,000 servers in under 48 hours, at a 64.6% success rate, harvesting credentials at industrial scale through a single critical Next.js vulnerability. At the time, the group was little known. Months later it breached GitHub’s internal repositories and made off with thousands of them, one of the most consequential software supply-chain compromises of the year. Beelzebub had documented the actor before most of the industry knew its name.

No human team works at that speed or scale. For most of its history, cybersecurity did not have to contend with one that could. It was a symmetric contest: humans attacked, and humans defended, both bound by the same limit — human speed. Reconnaissance was manual, exploits were built by hand, targets were taken one at a time, and the analysts on the other side were, more or less, an even match. The fight was slow, costly, and survivable.

That symmetry has broken. Attackers are now AI-enabled while defenders remain, overwhelmingly, human. A single operator can run thousands of campaigns in parallel; exploits ship within minutes of disclosure; frontier models reason like senior operators; and the marginal cost of an attack is collapsing toward zero. On the other side sits a security team of fewer than ten people who cannot hire their way out of the gap because talent is scarce and onboarding is slow. The contest is no longer symmetric, and at human speed it is no longer survivable.

This is the problem Beelzebub was built to solve, and it is why we led its €3M seed round. Founded as an open-source research project in Milan in 2021 by Mario Candela and incorporated in 2025, Beelzebub is an AI-native security platform built on a single premise: assumed breach. It does not try to keep attackers out. It assumes one is already inside the network, and it engineers the environment so that the intruder reveals themselves the moment they move. That is a deliberate architectural choice and a thesis about where defense must occur once the perimeter is no longer the line that matters.

The platform runs as a single automated loop across three products. Arcangelo, the offensive layer, continuously simulates a frontier-model adversary against the live perimeter and flags newly disclosed vulnerabilities within seconds. Beelzebub Cloud, the defensive layer, seeds the infrastructure with LLM-powered decoys that are indistinguishable from real production systems and reshape themselves in real time to mimic the newest CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) as they are published — so that dormant intruders are drawn into the open, every alert is a confirmed breach attempt rather than noise, and compromised systems are isolated on contact. Caronte, the analysis layer, reverse-engineers each captured payload and produces a full incident report in minutes rather than the days or weeks a human analyst would need. Offense and defense feed one another, with no handoffs between tools or vendors.

What makes the company defensible is not any single capability but the loop itself. Each layer was designed with the others in mind, and the system improves the more it is attacked: more than 60 independent researchers feed live threat intelligence into the platform as new techniques appear in the wild — the same open-source engine that has passed 2,100 GitHub stars and is in daily use by security engineers at some of the most demanding infrastructure organizations in the world. Threat-hunting teams used it to deploy a decoy on the open web and capture live attacks in real time. It is a posture that turns every attempted intrusion into an advantage.

On Mario

It is rare to meet a founder whose technical authority and product instinct align as completely with the problem in front of them. Mario Candela started coding at nine and founded a hacker community at fourteen. He trained as a computer engineer, wrote his thesis on automated penetration testing, and spent more than a decade in senior technical roles across Daimler, Sky, Wolters Kluwer, HackerOne, Zurich, and NTT Data. He is a member of The Honeynet Project, the international organization devoted to studying live attacker behavior, and the creator of the Beelzebub open-source project.

Beelzebub did not begin as a company, and the open-source project remains its foundation. Mario built it on the side, and the company grew up around the project rather than in place of it: the code was good enough that enterprises came to rely on it — filing issues, requesting features, and treating a research effort as critical infrastructure until sustaining it became impossible on its own. Demand pulled the company into existence, and the project it was built on is still open and still core. In a domain where technical judgment is the primary source of defensibility, a project that earns that kind of dependence is the clearest signal we look for, and one we rarely see this cleanly.

Built in Italy, hiring for the frontier

Beelzebub is being built from Milan, and that matters to us. Italy has produced world-class security talent for a generation and exported much of it. The opportunity now is to keep that talent and to draw it back. The company is assembling a research team around Mario, including experienced vulnerability researchers, and will open commercial offices in Rome and San Francisco by the end of 2026 — but its center of gravity, its research and its hardest engineering, stays in Italy.

The problem it is working on is among the most demanding in software: adversaries that move at machine speed, an attack surface expanding faster than any team can cover by hand, and a research frontier — the security of AI agents themselves — that barely existed two years ago. As enterprises put agents into production, they are opening a surface almost no one is equipped to defend. Beelzebub extends the same deception logic to it, planting decoy tools an agent should never call, so that a hijacked agent gives itself away the instant it reaches for one. For engineers and researchers who want to work at that frontier — on real adversaries rather than synthetic benchmarks, with their work visible in an open-source project used worldwide — there are few better places to be.

Beelzebub is the kind of company we look for and rarely find: a category-defining approach to a large and structurally growing market, led by a founder whose expertise is the source of the company’s edge, at the earliest stage at which conviction can be expressed. When offensive AI scales faster than any human team can respond, the only viable defense is one that operates at the same speed and intelligence. Beelzebub is building it.

What the round enables

The €3M brings Beelzebub’s total funding to €3.3M, following a pre-seed from strategic investors and advisors. The capital will expand the research team, open the Rome and San Francisco offices, and accelerate client acquisition across Europe, which is now operating under NIS2 and the Cyber Resilience Act. The near-term priority is people: the researchers and operators who will turn a validated platform into the category standard.

We are proud to be working with Mario and the team he is building. For most of computing history, defenders could count on moving at the same speed as their attackers. That assumption is gone — and Beelzebub is the most convincing answer we have found to the question it leaves behind.

Read more on:

Tech.eu 🗞️ Beelzebub raises €3M to strengthen enterprise cyber defence with AI

Tech Funding News 🗞️ GitHub side project Beelzebub converts Microsoft, AWS and Google adoption into €3M seed: The exclusive pitch deck it used

EU-Startups 🗞️ Milan’s Beelzebub raises €3 million to fight AI-driven cyberattacks with AI-powered hacker traps

Security Week 🗞️ Beelzebub Raises $3.4 Million for Hacker-Trapping Platform

Subscribe now

Nezahat brings not only an exceptional track record, but also the kind of thoughtful, international perspective that feels deeply aligned with the next chapter we want to build at United Ventures.

She joins us at an important moment for the firm, as we continue to strengthen our international reach, deepen our presence across the European technology ecosystem, and support founders with increasingly global ambitions. Her arrival is a meaningful addition to United Ventures’ strategic path and a valuable opportunity for our team and portfolio to benefit from her perspective, experience and network.

Nezahat brings more than two decades at the intersection of technology, capital and corporate strategy, across Silicon Valley, Europe and emerging markets. Her career began in Silicon Valley, at Broadview and Lehman Brothers, where she became one of Lehman’s youngest lead technology bankers, covering deals across the US and Europe. She went on to lead technology investment banking across EMEA at Credit Suisse and Nomura, rebuilding the practice and launching its growth-stage offering; moved to the principal side at Temasek, Singapore’s global investment firm, backing technology companies across Europe and joining their boards; and built UniCredit’s advisory business from the ground up, shaping its strategy, culture and team. Along the way she was a founding member of Tech Nation’s Future Fifty program, working with the UK government to help build one of Europe’s most significant technology ecosystems.

Today she advises founders, CEOs, and boards as they scale and transform, and serves as an independent director at listed technology companies, including Logo Yazılım and Stillfront. She holds a master’s from Stanford, which she attended as a Fulbright Scholar, and graduated first in her class in industrial engineering in Turkey.

At United Ventures, Nezahat will help us further develop our international positioning and support our portfolio companies as they scale beyond their home markets. Her contribution will be especially valuable as we continue to back European technology companies with the ambition and potential to compete globally.

To mark her joining, we sat down with Nezahat for a conversation about company-building, international scale, the evolution of the European technology ecosystem, and the role United Ventures can play in helping founders connect with global opportunities.

Below, she shares her perspective on what separates locally successful companies from globally competitive ones, where European founders still have room to grow, and what continues to shape her view of technology and innovation.

Nezahat, we're so happy to have you on board! To kick things off: you've built a career by moving between very different vantage points on the same industry. What did moving between them teach you that staying put never would have?

I’ve been fortunate to sit in nearly every seat at the table over a 20-plus-year career: investment banker, principal investor, business and ecosystem builder, board member. Together they’ve given me the ability to connect the dots between capital, strategy, organization, and market dynamics. Through all of it, what has mattered most has stayed the same: integrity, grit, curiosity, care for the people I work with, and the conviction that the most durable outcomes are built on trust.

Each seat taught me something the others couldn’t. Investment banking gave me an acute sense of the corporate life cycle: reading where a company could go, and whether the team has the vision and execution to get there. As a principal investor, your skin is in the game. You need a thesis on where the market is heading, so you can anticipate the gaps and back the founders solving them, with clarity from the outset on what you’re underwriting, a future sale or a company built to stand on its own. The boardroom taught me that governance is inseparable from value creation.

What ties it together is human capital and financial capital coming together, anchored in trust, to build value with purpose. That thread, more than any single seat, is what shapes how I see around corners today.

So, why United Ventures, and why now?

I’m thrilled to be joining the United Ventures family. Under Massimiliano and Paolo’s leadership, the firm has played a foundational role in building the Italian tech ecosystem. What sets them apart is the ability to see problems and opportunities before they become obvious, in deeptech above all, and to back audacious founders who combine vision, technical strength and execution discipline. They are true partners through the journey; Musixmatch and Faceit are great examples. I also respect their operational heritage and global mindset, spotting local talent and helping companies scale internationally.

Italy, and Europe more broadly, is at a pivotal point in the innovation cycle. I saw this firsthand thirteen years ago at Tech City UK, David Cameron’s initiative to foster the UK ecosystem, and the same elements are converging in Italy now: deepening technical talent, universities working more closely with industry, success stories inspiring a new generation of founders, proven entrepreneurs recycling their intellectual and financial capital, and ambition at scale.

The scale-up stage is a critical inflection point. Founders need investors who can support their evolution from early-stage to scale-up and beyond, with the operational and commercial acumen to open doors to capital, customers, partners, and talent across borders. United Ventures embodies that combination, and the timing feels right to add a global perspective.

Your focus here is internationalization. When you strip away the obvious "more countries" reading, what does that word actually mean for a VC firm?

To me, internationalization today is less about geographic footprint and more about building global connectivity: real access across the whole value chain, from universities and research to human and financial capital, corporates, partners and policymakers worldwide. That connectivity gives you a richer view of how the landscape is evolving, helps identify the gaps that drive investment conviction, and supports our portfolio’s global ambitions.

It matters more than ever as AI and the maturing of tech ecosystems make borders less relevant. Physical presence still counts, but connectivity counts for more: it’s what lets portfolio companies reach the capital, talent and conviction they need to scale.

Northern Europe has been quicker to act on global ambitions and attract global capital. Italy and Southern Europe are now at the right moment to leapfrog, and United Ventures, with its track record backing category leaders from Italy and across the Italian diaspora, is well placed to lead that and build the momentum to compete on the world stage.

Where do you think European founders already punch above their weight, and where do they still underestimate what going global really asks of them?

European founders punch above their weight where there are real structural advantages. In deeptech, Europe’s research universities produce world-class talent across ML, AI, security and biotech; DeepMind is the obvious example. Creativity is native here, from gaming to music to fashion. And the continent’s complexity- so many countries, languages, payment systems and regulatory regimes- has forced founders to solve hard problems early, in mobile, fintech, payments, ecommerce and travel; having navigated that first, they often scaled globally before their US counterparts. Advanced manufacturing adds another edge, drawing on Europe’s industrial heritage, and the continent’s diversity and geopolitical position give companies an advantage in addressing the Middle East, Asia and other emerging markets.

Where I see room to grow: US founders have been remarkable at articulating a bold vision with conviction and commercial urgency from day one. European founders have equally transformative ideas and real technical depth; the next step is pairing that with the same commercial sharpness, an early go-to-market focus, and relentless execution. Silicon Valley thrives because collective success outweighs envy: people learn from one another, treat failure as part of the process, recruit the best at every level, and adapt fast. As Europe’s ecosystem matures, that mindset will bring more success.

A more unified, more enabling regulatory environment across Europe will be key to helping the continent’s tech reach the global stage it deserves.

United Ventures backs digital infrastructure, enabling technologies, deeptech and AI. Of all of those, which do you think will look most different five years from now?

The world is going through a transformative phase. It’s hard to predict where we’ll be in five years, but I believe AI will become far more embedded across every part of life and industry, even if the pace and depth of adoption vary by sector and demographic.

That will require infrastructure to evolve at both the hardware and software level. Security, from the infrastructure layer to the application layer, becomes more critical as AI scales. Real-time, unified data across databases, applications and cloud will be essential for agentic AI that acts autonomously within workflows while keeping humans in the loop. Computation moves toward the edge, demanding better form factors, stronger security and more efficient hardware, all deeptech imperatives, with semiconductors and advanced manufacturing evolving to support a distributed, edge-first world.

I expect enabling technologies to keep transforming verticals, embedded in enterprise and consumer applications across every industry. And deeptech fields like quantum computing and fusion will move closer to commercial reality.

A year in, what would tell you it's going well? And where do you want to start?

United Ventures is a fantastic team with a strong vision, deep experience, and a proven track record across technology cycles, leading with purpose and putting people first. I’d like to bring my experience and perspective to help the team read market dynamics, identify themes, and build conviction around investment opportunities.

I also expect to work closely with the portfolio. Having invested in, advised, and served on the boards of leading companies around the world, I want to help founders navigate what it takes to become category-leading businesses across product, positioning, execution, go-to-market, and business model evolution. I can add a perspective on capital strategy and on what investors at each stage look for, and help prepare companies for the next step, whether M&A or IPO. Above all, I’d like to bring the pattern recognition I’ve built across business models, geographies and sectors to help them fulfill their ambition at scale.

You've worked with some of the fastest-growing tech companies in the UK and Europe. For a founder with global ambition from day one, what's the one thing you'd tell them to do before they think they need to?

The best founders combine technical excellence with commercial acumen and instinct, from day one. Where I sometimes see gaps is when technical founders fall in love with the technology itself without thinking through the business model: how it will sell and scale, how customers buy, and how to make the product indispensable rather than nice-to-have. Technology moves so fast now that the real test is whether you can deliver enduring value.

That commercial instinct starts with understanding the problem deeply: how big it is, whether it’s temporary or structural, a local inefficiency or a global gap, and what your addressable market really is.

It also helps to surround yourself with the best: team, partners, investors and advisers who think long-term and have scaled globally. Learning from founders who’ve done it before is invaluable, because every market has its own structures and regulations, and their experience accelerates yours.

Commercial discipline from the start, clarity on the problem, and the right people around you: those turn ambition into a lasting company.

And away from work, what shapes how you think? A book, a place, a habit, anything that might surprise us.

Since childhood, I’ve been observant and curious, always thinking about how things could be done better. Business is serious, and there’s no better way to keep that childlike energy alive than travel: new places, cultures, and ways of living and thinking. Travel and nature engage the logical and the emotional parts of my brain at once; they spark ideas and let me dream, while keeping me grounded. Nature is a quiet teacher of resilience and reinvention; its patterns remind me that the most enduring things are built to withstand change. And I connect with people from every background, not as a learned skill but as an expression of empathy, and of the belief that everyone deserves to be truly heard.

Art, music and sport awaken emotion, and remind me that emotion, as much as logic, drives most human decisions. I also love to read, history and philosophy above all, because understanding people, and where we’ve come from, never stops fascinating me.

Underneath it all is observation: how people think, act and choose, and what drives them. Those are the things that keep me curious, and that shape how I see the world and make my decisions.

Thank you, Nezahat, for your thoughtful answers. Welcome to United Ventures, and to everything we'll build together!

Share

🔎 Search is changing. It is now being built for agents.

The web was designed for humans. Pages were written to be read, search engines were designed to surface links, and the retrieval stack has long assumed a person sitting behind a browser deciding what to click. That assumption no longer holds.

AI agents do not navigate the web like humans. They parse, extract, compare, and retrieve structured information across many queries in rapid sequence. Every millisecond of latency compounds. Every misparsed snippet can propagate downstream. Every dependency on a ranking system built for human clicks introduces a layer of fragility.

This is the gap Seltz was built to close, and it is why we are proud to have joined the company’s $12.5M Seed round.

Founded by Antonio Mallia, Seltz is rebuilding the web retrieval stack from first principles for AI agents and large language models. The round is led by Speedinvest and B Capital, with United Ventures joining alongside futurepresent, Italian Founders Fund, arc Investors, Vento Ventures, Mango Capital, 2100 Ventures, and Future Back Ventures. The news was broken by Fortune’s AI editor, Jeremy Kahn, in an interview with Antonio.

Most “AI search” products on the market today are wrappers. They sit atop Google, Bing, or Brave, taking results designed for human consumption and reformatting them for agents. This may work on a small scale. It becomes fragile as agents move into production.

Latency compounds across multi-step retrieval. Costs scale linearly with API calls. Results carry the ranking biases of consumer search. And the wrapper layer cannot make architectural choices that the underlying engine refuses to allow.

Seltz chose the harder path.

Antonio and the team made the deliberate decision to build everything from scratch, owning and operating the full retrieval stack: crawling, knowledge extraction, indexing, retrieval, and ranking. Instead of returning a ranked list of links that an agent then has to interpret, Seltz gives agents what they actually need: fresh, citable, structured information delivered in milliseconds.

The early results suggest how much this architectural choice matters. Seltz’s first public benchmark, the Dynamic News Search Benchmark, places the company at industry-leading levels of both accuracy and speed, with 89% retrieval accuracy at 166 milliseconds end-to-end. Six months after the public release of its API, developer sign-ups have grown roughly sixfold, and the company has indexed more than 500 million web pages with effectively no marketing budget.

What makes Seltz defensible is the choice to own the stack. In a market where most competitors depend on third-party search results they cannot control, Seltz can make architectural decisions and capture value across the entire pipeline. As agents move closer to production, those decisions matter more. They also become harder to replicate from a wrapper.

Antonio has written about this choice in his own words, and his piece is the clearest articulation of the architectural argument behind Seltz. The short version is simple: an agent querying a Google wrapper receives the same documents Google would have surfaced anyway, ranked for human clicks rather than for the agent’s task. Genuine independence requires owning the index. Owning the index makes everything downstream possible.

A founder built for this problem

Antonio Mallia is one of the most credible builders we have met in the field of information retrieval.

He holds a PhD in Computer Science from NYU, where he focused on large-scale web search and the efficiency of information retrieval. He is the lead author of PISA, one of the fastest academic search engines ever built, and has spent the last decade running search infrastructure at Bloomberg, on Amazon’s AGI team, and at Pinecone.

His work has been presented at the field’s leading international conferences, and he has built a reputation in the information retrieval community as one of the few researchers who can move fluently between academic rigor and production systems at scale.

That dual fluency is rare. It is exactly what an undertaking like Seltz requires.

Antonio has also surrounded the company with a community of advisors and angel investors drawn from the same intersection: leading academic researchers in information retrieval, and senior operators at some of the most important AI infrastructure companies in the world.

There is also a quieter Italian thread running through the story.

Antonio’s training in information retrieval began at the University of Pisa, before his PhD at NYU. Pisa is a small city with an unusually deep research tradition in search and information retrieval, and that ecosystem helped shape the technical foundation Antonio is now bringing to Seltz.

He moved to the United States to build at the frontier of AI infrastructure, and is now building one of the most ambitious AI infrastructure companies from San Francisco. At the same time, Seltz maintains meaningful technical roots in Europe and Italy, with a team working across San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Pisa, Berlin, and Leipzig.

For us, that combination matters: an Italian researcher building at the center of the AI infrastructure market, while keeping research and engineering capacity connected to the community that trained him.

What the round enables

The $12.5M round will support Seltz as it expands its crawling and indexing infrastructure, grows its engineering and research team, and accelerates go-to-market with frontier AI labs, AI-native startups, and enterprise customers operating in domains where retrieval accuracy has real consequences.

As agents become primary consumers of the web, the infrastructure they retrieve through has to be rebuilt for them.

Seltz is doing exactly that.

We are proud to be working alongside Antonio and the entire Seltz team, together with investors and advisors who understand both the technical depth and the commercial trajectory of what is being built here.

The United Ventures Team

The dominant story in quantum computing has been a hardware story. Who has more qubits, who has cleaner gates, whose architecture will set the standard. That race is real and it is consequential, but it is not the whole picture. A quantum computer is a measuring instrument before it is a useful tool. Without an algorithmic layer that can extract reliable answers from noisy machines, every qubit added to the stack is a qubit waiting for software to catch up.

This is where Algorithmiq has positioned itself, and it is why we led their €18M round. Founded in 2020 by Sabrina Maniscalco, Guillermo García-Pérez, Matteo Rossi, and Boris Sokolov, Algorithmiq builds the algorithms and the middleware that turn today’s noisy quantum hardware into instruments capable of solving real scientific problems. The company has deliberately chosen not to build qubits. It has chosen instead to build the layer above them: error mitigation, hybrid classical-quantum orchestration, and application software for chemistry and life sciences. That choice is a thesis about where the durable value in this industry will accrue.

The thesis has been validated faster than most.

In 2025, Algorithmiq and IBM reported one of the strongest candidates to date for quantum advantage on a scientifically meaningful problem, with results entered into the open Quantum Advantage Tracker and benchmarked against leading classical methods. It is the sole winner of Wellcome Leap’s Q4Bio $2M prize, a major global challenge for quantum applications in biology and health, ahead of teams from Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, Nottingham, and Infleqtion. Its noise mitigation product is available through IBM’s Qiskit Functions Catalog for eligible IBM Quantum users. It has signed major commercial agreements with Microsoft, IBM, and Rigetti, and works with leading quantum and research organizations, including Google, AWS, Cleveland Clinic, and CERN.

What makes the company defensible is not any single result, but the integration of the full software stack. Algorithmiq controls the pipeline from quantum state initialization to error mitigation to measurement to chemistry-specific optimization. Each layer was designed with the others in mind. That is what allows the system to extract meaningful computation from hardware that, on its own, would be too noisy to use. It is also what makes the company hardware-agnostic in a sector where backing the wrong machine is an existential risk for investors.

On Sabrina

It is rare to meet a founder whose scientific authority and entrepreneurial ambition align so clearly. Sabrina Maniscalco spent two decades as one of the most-cited researchers in quantum information, holding a full professorship at the University of Helsinki and co-directing the Finnish Center of Excellence for Quantum Technologies. She has published more than 250 scientific papers, many of which focus on quantum noise, the very problem that today defines the gap between theoretical promise and industrial use. The technical direction of Algorithmiq is, in a literal sense, an extension of her research.

What makes Sabrina exceptional, though, is that she has refused to let science live only in the laboratory. She organized the first Quantum Game Jam, helping launch a global movement to make quantum literacy accessible. She co-founded Women 4 Quantum and authored its Manifesto of Values. She has built education platforms, given TED and TEDx talks, and developed cross-disciplinary formats that connect quantum physics to art, music, and the outdoors. She has done all of this while raising over €36M, building a team of more than forty researchers and engineers across four countries, and signing partnerships with the largest names in quantum hardware.

She is now bringing the company she built in Helsinki home to Milan, and that decision is another important reason we led this round.

Bringing a quantum software leader to Italy

Algorithmiq is moving its global headquarters to Milan, and this is not a symbolic relocation. Sabrina and her co-founders have chosen to build the company in Italy because the conditions for doing so have changed. The 2025 National Quantum Strategy, the European Commission’s strategic focus on quantum sovereignty, and the depth of Italian scientific talent in physics and mathematics now combine into something that did not exist a few years ago. A serious quantum company can be headquartered here, access world-class research, public and private capital, and a regulatory environment that supports this industry's success.

Italy has been at the foundations of modern physics for a century, from the Via Panisperna group around Fermi to the contemporary research ecosystem in Trieste, Trento, Pavia, Milan, and Naples. The country has produced quantum talent at scale and exported much of it. Algorithmiq’s decision reverses that flow. The company is bringing senior scientific leadership to Milan and creating a destination for Italian researchers who have spent years abroad and who, for the first time in a generation, have a credible reason to come home.

For United Ventures, this is the kind of company we look for, and rarely find. We invest in European deep tech with global ambition, and we invest with the conviction that European founders can build category leaders without leaving the continent. Algorithmiq is the clearest expression of that thesis we have backed in the quantum space.

What the round enables

The €18M brings Algorithmiq’s total funding to €36M, the largest amount ever raised by a quantum startup in Italy. The capital will be used to scale the team beyond 100 people by 2028, with the immediate priority on senior commercial hires and on accelerating the R&D roadmap toward quantum utility. The end state is a full suite serving the world’s leading hardware platforms and the industrial customers building on top of them.

We are proud to be working with Sabrina, Guillermo, Matteo, Boris, Kirsten, and the entire team. The question in quantum is shifting from who can build the biggest machine to who can make the machines matter. We think Algorithmiq has the clearest answer.

🗞️ Official press release (IT-EN)

🗞️ Read more on Sifted and La Repubblica

Subscribe now

The hospitality technology stack of the last fifteen years was built on a quiet bargain. Independent hotels gained global distribution through online travel agencies and, in exchange, surrendered between 15% and 25% of every gross booking — a margin transfer that, compounded across a fragmented continent of small operators, has reshaped the industry's economics. Booking visibility came at the cost of pricing autonomy, direct customer relationships, and, ultimately, a structural dependency on intermediaries whose interests rarely align with the long-term sustainability of independent properties.

That bargain is now coming undone, and the instrument of its undoing is software that no longer behaves like a tool.

United Ventures and CDP Venture Capital have led a €47 million Series B round in Smartness — including primary, secondary, and a debt component — alongside existing investor Partech, which led the Series A at the end of 2023. Based on available market data, this is the largest round ever closed in Italy for a vertical SaaS company, bringing Smartness's total capital raised past €60 million. Roughly half of the proceeds will fund M&A, with the company already in advanced negotiations on its next acquisition, while the remainder will accelerate hiring and international scaling across the DACH region and beyond.

Subscribe now

From software tools to operational systems

The thesis behind our investment rests on a category shift that is reshaping vertical SaaS as a whole. For three decades, business software has lived inside a clear functional perimeter: it presented information, structured workflows, and waited for a human to act. The customer paid for tools; the customer remained accountable for results. AI is now collapsing that perimeter. The next generation of vertical platforms does not stop at decision support — it executes operational tasks on behalf of the customer, taking direct responsibility for outcomes. We refer to this category as agentic systems, and we believe it represents one of the most consequential shifts in enterprise software since the move from on-premise to cloud.

Hospitality is a particularly fertile substrate for this transition. The European market is structurally fragmented — independent properties account for roughly 60% of supply — and chronically under-digitized, with many operators still relying on manual processes for pricing, distribution, and guest communication. The operational surface area is enormous, the labor intensity is real, and the gap between what enterprise chains can afford and what a small independent hotelier can deploy has only widened. This is the gap an agentic platform can close at scale, and it is precisely the gap Smartness has been engineering toward since 2020.

A founding team that knows the industry from the inside

We do not invest in categories. We invest in founders, and the conviction we have in Smartness is, before anything else, conviction in its founding team. Luca Rodella, CEO, is a serial entrepreneur in travel-tech with a decade of ventures inside the hospitality sector — the kind of operator whose product intuitions are calibrated by years of conversations with hoteliers, not by market reports. Eugenio Bancaro, CPTO, brings deep software engineering expertise honed across Silicon Valley and a portfolio of technical projects that long predates Smartness. Tommaso Centonze, COO, joined from Google in Dublin with a background in international business development and a CEMS-tracked formation that maps directly onto the company’s go-to-market geography.

This combination — direct sector knowledge, technical depth, commercial discipline — is the structural reason a company founded in Trentino has been able to build, in five years, what Smartness has built. Starting from a single product, Smartpricing, the team has expanded into a modular platform that now spans property management, guest communication, CRM and upselling, and payments — solutions that work both as standalone modules and as an integrated end-to-end suite. The architecture matters: it lets the company land with one product and expand into the full operational stack, which is exactly what the data shows is happening.

The numbers behind the conviction

The commercial trajectory has been one of the most compelling we have observed in European vertical SaaS. Smartness today serves more than 5,000 customers across 41 countries, with a particularly strong footprint in Italy and the DACH region. Since Partech’s Series A, revenue has grown more than 6x, while organic growth — excluding any contribution from M&A — has been sustained at approximately 10% month over month. Among the leading global SaaS players in lodging, Smartness has been among the fastest, if not the fastest, to reach and clearly surpass €10 million in revenue — a benchmark that, in our view, places it on a credible path to €100 million ARR and beyond.

Consolidation as a deliberate strategy

European vertical SaaS, in hospitality and elsewhere, is reaching the phase of the cycle in which fragmentation becomes the dominant structural feature of the market — a long tail of regional point solutions, each strong in its niche, none with the resources to build the agentic stack the next decade will require. Our conviction is that the European leader in hospitality technology will not be built purely organically. It will be built by an operator capable of combining product velocity with disciplined M&A execution. Smartness has already completed several acquisitions and is now in advanced negotiations on the next, with roughly half of this round earmarked for inorganic growth. The 2026 target — tripling revenue through organic and inorganic levers combined — is ambitious, and the operational discipline we have observed in the team makes us believe it is achievable.

The European angle

There is, finally, a structural point worth making about geography. Italian vertical SaaS has historically suffered from a perceived ceiling: companies that build deep domain expertise in a single national market and never quite cross into continental scale. Smartness inverts this pattern. The DACH region already accounts for a meaningful share of revenue, the product roadmap is built natively for international deployment, and the team’s ambition — explicitly articulated by Rodella — is to become the first global AI technology provider for hotels and non-hotel accommodations. The Italian innovation ecosystem needs more companies that start in a regional market and become continental category leaders. We believe Smartness has the founding team, the product architecture, the financial discipline, and now the capital base to be one of them.

The shift from software tools to operational systems is one of the defining technological waves of this cycle. Smartness is among the few European companies positioned to ride it from the front. We are proud to lead this round and look forward to supporting Luca, Eugenio, Tommaso, and the entire team as they build, from Rovereto outward, what we believe can become a global category leader.

Subscribe now

On co-leading the €12M Series B alongside eCAPITAL

Most fraud prevention in banking is built around a single question: does this transaction look suspicious? It is a reasonable question. It is also asked too late.

By the time a fraudulent payment is processed, the attacker has already completed the hard work: the reconnaissance, the infrastructure assembly, the trial runs, the exploitation of a compromised session. Transaction-layer detection catches the final step of a structured campaign and calls it fraud prevention. What it actually captures is the confirmation that damage has occurred.

This is the gap Cleafy was built to close.

Founded in 2014 by Matteo Bogana, Nicolò Pastore, and Carmine Giangregorio, three technologists with backgrounds in cybersecurity rather than in the fraud establishment, Cleafy approaches banking fraud as what it actually is: a cyberattack with a kill chain. The platform reconstructs how attacks form across sessions, devices, and channels in real time, identifying hostile infrastructure and attacker intent before any fraudulent transaction is attempted. The question it answers is not “does this payment look anomalous?” but “is there an active attack in progress, and at what stage?”

The architecture follows from that question, and building it required stepping entirely outside the assumptions of the incumbent fraud industry.

When we led Cleafy’s Series A in 2023, the thesis was clear: a team with genuine cybersecurity depth had identified a structural blind spot in how banks defend themselves, and had built a detection architecture that the existing market could not replicate. What convinced us then was not only the technology but the early proof of product-market fit: 100 million users protected, and a retention rate that held at 100%.

The decision to back Cleafy again in this Series B was grounded in what has happened since. The user base has grown to 250 million across more than 150 financial institutions in Europe and Latin America. Customer churn remains zero. Banks that shift from reactive transaction scoring to upstream attack detection do not go back, and Cleafy’s numbers make that plain.

This round also brings in eCAPITAL as co-lead, and that matters beyond the capital. eCAPITAL is an experienced deep tech and cybersecurity investor, with a portfolio that includes several European companies working on critical infrastructure protection. Their decision to lead this round alongside us reflects a shared conviction about where the European security landscape is heading, and adds an international dimension to Cleafy’s backing that strengthens the company’s credibility as it scales.

The broader context is worth naming. Critical infrastructure protection has become one of the defining topics in European technology and policy. DORA and NIS2 are raising the bar for what financial institutions are required to demonstrate in terms of resilience, and the geopolitical environment has sharpened attention on the security of systems that European economies depend on. Cleafy’s work sits squarely in this space: protecting the financial infrastructure that underpins daily economic life, with a technology approach sophisticated enough to match the threat.

With this round, the company accelerates on three fronts: expanding its global threat intelligence network through Cleafy Labs, which has already identified more than 60% of known global banking malware; entering new markets in DACH and Asia-Pacific; and extending its detection capabilities inside the enterprise with Cleafy for Workforce, which applies the same attack-centric approach to insider threats and compromised accounts within corporate systems.

We are proud to continue the partnership with Matteo and the team as they move into this next chapter.

L'articolo Why We Backed Cleafy Again proviene da United Ventures.

We treat health like an emergency instead of a priority. Qura changes that.

When something is acutely wrong — a broken bone, a cardiac event, a sudden infection — the system responds. But for the vast majority of people, navigating health looks very different. It looks like months of fatigue that no GP takes seriously. It looks like hormonal imbalances dismissed as stress. It looks like a digestive problem that bounces between three specialists without resolution. It looks like being handed a lab report with no context, and turning to Google for answers.

This is not a niche problem. An estimated one in five adults in Europe lives with persistent subclinical symptoms — conditions that fall below the threshold of a formal diagnosis, but substantially erode quality of life. The system has no mechanism to address them proactively. Consultations are too short. Diagnostics are siloed. No one is connecting the dots.

The result is a structural gap that is large, growing, and largely unaddressed. The European health check-up market is projected to reach €18.6 billion by 2030. EU countries spent €90.4 billion on preventive care in 2022 alone. The demand is there. What has been missing is the infrastructure to serve it intelligently.

That is what Qura is building.

A new paradigm, not a new app

The digital health space is crowded with point solutions — symptom trackers, supplement subscriptions, telemedicine platforms, wearable dashboards. Most of them generate data. Very few generate clarity. And almost none of them close the loop between data, clinical interpretation, and a concrete plan of action.

Qura is designed differently. Members begin with comprehensive blood testing at one of Qura’s partner laboratories. Results are processed through a proprietary AI health-mapping engine that connects biomarker data with symptoms and lifestyle patterns. Every analysis is reviewed by a licensed physician. This is followed by a 45-minute personalised consultation, where the medical team walks the user through their health map and delivers a tailored intervention protocol — covering nutrition, supplementation, sleep, stress regulation, and behavioural adjustments. Periodically, users retest. The AI updates their health map based on biomarker evolution. The loop closes.

This is not a chatbot and it is not a wellness app. It is a fully integrated, longitudinal health system — one that treats the patient as a whole, tracks them over time, and gets smarter with every interaction.

The model’s defining architectural choice is the hybrid human-AI approach. Doctors remain at the centre of the experience. AI enhances their efficiency, sharpens personalisation, and builds the longitudinal data layer that makes recommendations increasingly precise. This is not AI replacing clinical judgment — it is AI making clinical judgment scalable. That distinction matters enormously, both for regulatory alignment and for consumer trust.

Why the moat is real

We look for businesses where the structural advantages compound over time. Qura has three that matter.

The first is the learning engine. Every test processed, every consultation completed, every protocol delivered feeds back into the model. The system becomes more accurate, more personalised, and more defensible with scale. This is a compounding advantage that lightweight competitors — consumer apps, static lab services — cannot replicate without the same longitudinal data.

The second is regulatory depth. Qura is building EU-native infrastructure from the ground up: GDPR-compliant, medically validated, integrated with local laboratory networks. Regulatory alignment in European healthcare is genuinely hard. It is also genuinely valuable. It opens distribution channels — employers, insurers, national health systems — that are closed to players who treat compliance as an afterthought. And it raises a barrier that fast-moving replicas will struggle to cross.

The third is the institutional opportunity. Insurers across Europe face rising avoidable costs: repeated specialist visits, duplicated diagnostics, unmanaged chronic conditions, claims that could have been prevented with earlier intervention. Qura’s longitudinal health data is precisely the asset insurers need to identify risk early, personalise products, and reduce preventable claims. Qura as infrastructure for insurers and employers is the long-term platform play.

The team

Thesis alone does not justify conviction. The founding team does.

Virginia Gambardella did not arrive at this problem theoretically. She bootstrapped Italy’s first mindfulness app to €30,000 in monthly recurring revenue, built a health-focused community of over 500,000 people, and served as Head of Operations at Serenis, one of Italy’s leading digital therapy platforms — after starting her career at McKinsey. She understands how to grow a consumer health product, how to operate at scale, and how to build trust with an audience that is deeply sceptical of health technology that overpromises.

CTO and co-founder Gioacchino Grand is a two-time founding engineer who has scaled technology teams from pre-seed to Series A. He brings the infrastructure depth that a platform of this ambition requires.

Together, they have built early traction that validates the core hypothesis: people are willing to pay, repeatedly, for a health experience that actually gives them answers.

The ambition

By 2030, Qura aims to become the missing middle layer of modern European healthcare — the system that sits between the individual and the traditional care infrastructure, connecting fragmented data into a coherent health picture, and translating that picture into action.

The vision extends beyond consumers. A future where Qura’s health intelligence layer integrates with how insurers price risk, how employers structure benefits, and how care providers design preventive pathways is a large and plausible one. The infrastructure being built today — the lab integrations, the clinical validation, the AI engine, the regulatory framework — is the foundation for that platform.

We are proud to lead this round, and to back a team that is building with the rigour and ambition the opportunity deserves.

United Ventures led Qura’s €1.5M pre-seed round. The round also includes participation from Vento and Italian Angels for Growth.

L'articolo Investing in Qura: the case for a new health paradigm proviene da United Ventures.

At United Ventures, we believe the next frontier of automation will be defined not only by intelligent machines but by the software that enables them to think, act, and collaborate in the real world. That vision comes to life in Cyberwave, a company building the operating layer between AI agents and physical machines, a bridge between intelligence and action.

Today, we’re proud to announce that United Ventures is leading Cyberwave’s €7 million funding round, alongside The TechShop, Vento, Pi Campus, and several prominent angel investors.

A new operating layer for robotics

Cyberwave’s mission is simple yet transformative: make advanced automation frictionless. The company is developing a platform that connects robots, AI models, and enterprise systems, enabling industrial robots to form an interconnected, flexible workforce. By reducing the complexity and cost of integrating robotic systems, Cyberwave allows manufacturers of all sizes to deploy automation faster and smarter.

At its core, Cyberwave’s technology unifies diverse hardware under a single orchestration and AI control layer, cutting development timelines from months to weeks. This means that a project that once required extensive custom coding can now scale rapidly across robot types and production tasks — a fundamental shift for industries where time-to-value directly impacts ROI.

As declared by the founders in their manifesto:

“For years, we’ve watched AI get smarter — reasoning, planning, understanding context with uncanny precision. But there’s been a wall: a hard edge where intelligence stops and the physical world begins.
Cyberwave exists to break down that wall. We’re building the bridge that lets developers move machines with the same confidence they deploy web services.”

That vision — making the physical world programmable — perfectly captures what we see as one of the defining opportunities of this decade.

The Founders: product vision meets deep technical execution

At the heart of Cyberwave are Simone Di Somma and Vittorio Banfi, two founders who bring together deep technical expertise, product vision, and a shared obsession with turning ambitious ideas into a scalable reality.

Simone, a Y Combinator alumnus, previously founded Askdata, a startup that enabled users to interact with data through natural language and was later acquired by SAP. He knows what it means to build from first demo to enterprise adoption and to navigate the whole journey from concept to impact. Vittorio, meanwhile, founded Botsociety, a platform for designing conversational experiences, which was acquired by a major tech company. Simone and Vittorio first met in San Francisco years ago — different backgrounds, but a common drive: to give builders superpowers and make intelligent automation accessible, safe, and useful.

Today, they are building Cyberwave from three global hubs that reflect the company’s DNA.
From Milan, the heart of European manufacturing excellence, they stay close to machine builders and operators, the people who stress-test automation against cost, safety, and uptime. In Zurich, they draw from a deep culture of robotics precision and engineering rigor. And in San Francisco, they connect to the world’s fastest-moving AI ecosystem, bringing velocity and ambition to their mission.

It’s a blend that embodies Cyberwave’s spirit, grounded in real-world industry, driven by technology, and inspired by global vision.

Riding the next industrial wave

The timing could not be better. The global robotics market is projected to exceed $73 billion by 2029, driven by advancements in AI, computer vision, and machine learning. As industries embrace automation to address labor shortages and efficiency demands, the ability to orchestrate robots seamlessly, rather than integrate them manually, will become a decisive advantage.

Cyberwave is a first mover in Europe’s emerging robotics integration and orchestration market, already validating its technology through early pilots in manufacturing, logistics, and inspection. Its modular architecture, adaptive AI controllers, and plug-and-play integration capabilities provide a clear time-to-value advantage that traditional system integrators cannot easily replicate.

Why we’re excited

For United Ventures, Cyberwave represents the essence of what we look for in an investment: a visionary team with proven entrepreneurial DNA, a massive and fast-growing market ripe for disruption, and a product-based approach that brings scalability to a traditionally service-heavy industry.

Cyberwave’s platform has the potential to become the infrastructure backbone for AI-powered automation in Europe — a category-defining opportunity at the intersection of software, AI, and robotics.

We’re thrilled to partner with Simone, Vittorio, and the entire Cyberwave team as they bring frictionless automation to life.

L'articolo Our investment in Cyberwave: AI for the physical world proviene da United Ventures.

At United Ventures, we look for entrepreneurs who are not just building with technology, but building for it—addressing the very challenges that its acceleration has created. From foundational questions around the future of AI to the integrity of digital identity, we’re backing teams with the vision, execution, and global ambition to meet this moment.

Across our portfolio, we’ve seen breakthroughs in scale, funding, and market expansion. Here are a few stories that stood out:

• Exein raised €70M in a round led by Balderton to scale globally and secure the embedded world—it’s now protecting over a billion connected devices

• We led IdentifAI’s new €5M round to strengthen defenses against deepfakes and synthetic media

• Trustfull raised €6M with Seaya and Elevator Ventures to grow its identity verification and fraud prevention platform

• xFarm Technologies joined forces with Brazil’s Checkplant, extending its agtech platform to over 12 million hectares

You’ll find all the details below, plus more news from the team & a reading pick we think is worth your time this summer.

Wherever you are, we hope these weeks offer rest, clarity, and inspiration. More soon 🍦

—The United Ventures team

Subscribe now

✨ portfolio highlights ✨

Exein closed a €70 million Series C round led by Balderton and joined by Supernova and Lakestar, with continued support from previous investors 33N, Partech, and United Ventures. Over the past six years, we’ve had a front-row seat to their transformation—from bold startup to global leader in embedded runtime security.

Gianni Cuozzo, Exein’s founder, set out to build the “immune system” of digital life at a time when connected devices represent a growing target—one in three cyberattacks now come from IoT. As threats have shifted from IT departments to becoming a national security priority, Exein addresses the challenge at its root: making AI-powered, real-time threat detection a core layer of every device and not just a network add-on.

Exein now protects over one billion devices worldwide and continues to grow at over 450% year over year, partnering with manufacturers like MediaTek, Supermicro, and Kontron. This new funding will drive expansion into the US, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, and fuel product innovation in protecting AI models operating within edge devices—one of cybersecurity’s most pressing frontiers. Exein is also exploring acquisitions to scale both reach and capability.

Supporting Gianni and his team through each stage—from product inception to signing global partners, now to scaling continents—has been a privilege. This new chapter reinforces Exein’s position as a pioneer in securing the embedded world, where the next chapter of cybersecurity is being written.

Resilience Media

With its security tech now embedded in 1.5B devices, Exein raises €70 million at a €350M+ valuation

There are nearly 20 billion connected devices in the world today, used by people and organisations to communicate and do more with previously “dumb” physical objects than ever before…

Read more

a year ago · 1 like · Resilience Media

We doubled down our commitment to IdentifAI by leading a €5 million round, supporting their mission to address the urgent challenge of misinformation and the growing flood of manipulated digital content.

Headquartered in Italy and now expanding into Europe and the US, IdentifAI develops advanced technology to detect whether images, videos, or audio have been digitally altered or synthetically generated—helping organizations distinguish authentic content from deepfakes and AI fabrications in real time and at scale.

As deceptive synthetic media proliferates, public trust erodes: nearly 70% of those aware of generative AI worry about being misled, and many struggle to tell genuine from fake. IdentifAI meets this head-on by leveraging deep expertise in cybersecurity, AI research, and finance to deliver precise detection tools tailored to sectors like media, finance, and insurance.

Led by cybersecurity expert Marco Ramilli and finance veteran Marco Castaldo, their team builds proactive defenses that evolve alongside emerging generative models and misinformation tactics.

From seed stage to now, we’ve valued their clear vision and steady execution. This funding will accelerate product innovation, market expansion, and help restore trust in digital content for businesses and individuals alike.

Learn more about our investment in IdentifAI.

Trustfull, the Milan-based platform focused on advanced identity verification and fraud prevention, raised €6 million in a round led by Seaya and Elevator Ventures. We’re proud to continue as returning investors in a team committed to securing digital identities and mitigating risk.

Using real-time analysis of data points—such as phone numbers, emails, devices, and IP addresses—Trustfull empowers businesses to confirm identities and perform thorough risk assessments without interrupting the customer experience. Their platform supports critical workflows like KYC (Know Your Customer), KYB (Know Your Business), and AML (Anti-Money Laundering).

In an era where fraud tactics rapidly evolve—including synthetic identities, sophisticated phishing, and AI-driven schemes—Trustfull’s adaptive, signal-based approach provides continuous verification that goes beyond static document checks.

Serving sectors such as fintech, e-commerce, and iGaming, Trustfull is on track to process over 100 million identity verifications this year. The new funding will bolster their expansion across Italy, Spain, France, and other European markets.

Having supported Trustfull from its early days, we continue to admire their dedicated team and strong execution in setting new benchmarks for fraud prevention.

Learn more about our investment in Trustfull.

Earlier this year, we watched xFarm Technologies extend its reach into Latin America by joining forces with Brazil’s Checkplant. Recent months have brought even more momentum, with new partnerships, projects, and global impact. Its innovative digital platform sits at the heart of an ecosystem shaping the future of agriculture across Europe, Latin America, and beyond.

What’s next? With ongoing expansion, new tools for supply chain traceability, and deep collaborations across the agricultural value chain, xFarm Technologies continues to innovate for more sustainable, efficient, and resilient food systems, supporting farms of every size from Europe to Latin America.

To learn more, check out their latest Impact Report. It offers an inspiring view of what positive change looks like: in 2024, xFarm Technologies supported over 496,739 farmers, digitized 8.5 million hectares, and helped save more than 1.9 billion liters of water. But the real impact? It’s in every optimized irrigation, every byte of sensor data, every farmer empowered to take more sustainable decisions.

Earlier this year, we invested in Akamas to bring autonomous optimization to modern enterprise infrastructure.

Cloud and Kubernetes environments are incredibly powerful—but also complex, costly, and hard to tune. Akamas addresses this challenge head-on with an AI-driven platform that continuously fine-tunes application and infrastructure settings to strike the right balance between performance, reliability, and cost.

Spun out of Moviri and built on more than six years of R&D, Akamas turns what was once a specialized consulting service into intelligent software that adapts in real time. It doesn’t just reduce waste—it helps IT teams deliver faster, more resilient systems, without the guesswork.

We led Akamas’ $10 million funding round to support their next chapter: expanding across North America and Europe, deepening integrations with major observability platforms, and launching new capabilities like Kubernetes Insight and a SaaS version of their platform.

Led by Luca Forni and Stefano Doni, this is a team combining technical excellence with commercial traction. Revenue has tripled in the past year, their software supports major enterprises across finance, telecom, and retail, and their momentum is only accelerating.

Learn more about our investment in Akamas.

🌎 ecosystem 🌎

In June, we kicked off a new partnership with Bologna Business School—rooted in a shared commitment to fostering innovation where research, enterprise, and capital converge.

To mark the moment, Dean Max Bergami offered us a symbolic gift: a brick from the School’s new campus. A simple reminder that transformation begins with strong foundations. Together with founders, students, and investors, we explored how technology is reshaping business, society, and the future of work.

Venture capital has a role to play here—not just as funding, but as infrastructure, signal, and conviction. Especially where industrial heritage meets technological ambition. If Europe is to lead in this era, it must write its own story and support those bold enough to redefine it.

📅 save the date 📅

We’ll be on the road this fall. Hope to see you there:

Italian Tech Week, Turin | October 1–3
The flagship event for Italy’s tech ecosystem returns. We’re looking forward to reconnecting and to the conversations this edition will spark.

0100 Conference, Milan | October 27–29
A key gathering for private equity and venture capital in the Mediterranean region. We’ll join discussions on fundraising, market dynamics, and the evolving relationship between LPs and GPs.

👋 News from the Team 👋

Please welcome Gabriele Fiacconi to the United Ventures team!

Gabriele joined in June and works at the intersection of AI, engineering, and venture capital. He supports technical due diligence, product analysis, and infrastructure evaluations—and leads the development of internal AI tools that power our operations.

Before joining us, he was a senior AI engineer at a global consultancy, leading GenAI deployments for clients across finance, legal, and manufacturing. He brings experience in LLMOps, vector search, RAG systems, and cloud-native infrastructure.

He holds a degree in Applied Mathematics from Politecnico di Torino and is currently training for his second marathon. When not running, he enjoys golf, long walks around Rome, and reading anything he can get his hands on.

💡 insights 💡

“Looking ahead to the second half of the year, we expect continued momentum in sectors where Europe can play a strategic role—particularly AI-enabled enterprise software, cybersecurity, and deep tech infrastructure. At United Ventures, we remain committed to early-stage investments that leverage Europe’s rich technical talent and world-class research, while recognizing the urgent need for greater market integration and capital scale. The growing geopolitical focus on technological sovereignty is shifting perspectives—founders are more ambitious, and policymakers more aligned. This opens a window for Europe not to replicate models from abroad, but to chart its own course in innovation. We’re backing teams that understand this inflection point and are building globally competitive companies from day one, while deeply grounded in the European ecosystem.”

— Massimiliano Magrini, co-founder & managing partner, United Ventures

From The Big Book of VC – Q2 2025, which offers a clear snapshot of what’s really happening across the ecosystem. If you’re tracking venture in Europe, it’s worth a read—to see how the underlying dynamics are shifting in deeper, more strategic ways. Thanks to Rohit Yadav for pulling it all together.

📚 one book to read 📚

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. This sharp, insider memoir from Facebook’s former head of public policy offers a revealing look into the company’s internal culture and its responses to global crises—from the Rohingya genocide to censorship in China. Wynn-Williams delivers a damning portrait of misplaced priorities, moral drift, and leadership failures at the highest levels. Part cautionary tale, part corporate critique, the book is essential reading for anyone reflecting on power, technology, and accountability.

What stayed with me most is this: much of the harm described wasn’t always intentional. Some of it was—but often, it was the byproduct of not caring enough, of downplaying responsibility, or believing action wasn’t worth the effort. Still, every small decision we make in our professional lives can ripple outward, often in ways we don’t anticipate. For me, it was a reminder to care, to stay mindful and grounded—and to always act with integrity.

That’s all for today!

Thanks for reading United Ventures’ newsletter. Stay tuned and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn for more updates.

P.S. Have you enjoyed this newsletter? We’d love to hear your feedback ❤️ Feel free to share any questions or thoughts—just drop us a comment below. And if you know someone who might enjoy it, forward this along and point them to unitedventures.substack.com/subscribe to sign up.

Trustfull has raised a €6 million round led by Seaya Ventures and Elevator Ventures, with United Ventures investing again after leading the company’s first funding round in 2022. At the time, the company was still called Fido. The rebrand to Trustfull reflected a broader international ambition and a product built to address one of the most pressing challenges in today’s digital economy: how to verify trust online.

We backed Trustfull early because we believed in the team’s ability to rethink digital identity and risk assessment. Since then, the company has developed a robust, privacy-safe platform that can detect fraud in real-time, without compromising the user experience. Today, it is scaling across high-risk sectors, including fintech, e-commerce, and iGaming.

This funding comes at a time when the fraud prevention market is undergoing rapid change. The rise of generative AI is making it easier for attackers to create synthetic identities, automate phishing, and bypass traditional verification methods. Technologies once considered secure — from liveness checks and selfie comparisons to document scans and voice authentication — are increasingly vulnerable to manipulation.

To stay ahead of these threats, financial institutions must rethink how they verify identities. That means moving beyond static document checks and embracing real-time signal analysis. It means verifying whether contact details belong to the person requesting access, and using behavioral, geolocation, and network data to flag high-risk activity.

Trustfull’s platform is built for this reality. It operates silently in the background, analyzing hundreds of digital signals — including phone numbers, emails, IP addresses, devices, and domains — to assess risk in real-time. It integrates seamlessly with existing workflows, such as KYC, KYB, and AML, adding a powerful layer of intelligence without disrupting the user journey.

With strong product adoption and measurable impact across enterprise clients, Trustfull is on track to process over 100 million checks annually by the end of 2025. This new round will support the company’s expansion in Italy, Spain, and France, as well as its entry into new European markets and further development of its fraud detection capabilities.

At United Ventures, fintech has always been a central part of our investment strategy. We look for companies that combine deep technical innovation with a clear understanding of market needs, and that can deliver solutions both scalable and credible within the financial system.

Trustfull’s journey reflects this. It is a company solving a real problem with clarity and discipline, in a market where the demand for digital trust is only growing. This round also highlights the strength of European collaboration, with investors from Italy, Spain, and Austria supporting the next stage of growth.

We’re proud to continue backing Marko Maras and the team as they take Trustfull into its next chapter.

L'articolo Trustfull raises €6 million to expand its fraud prevention platform proviene da United Ventures.

A few months ago, a photo of Pope Francis wearing a white puffer jacket went viral. It was shared millions of times, discussed, praised, and mocked. Only later did most people realise the image had never existed. AI generated it.

That moment, trivial on the surface, marked a turning point. When a convincing image can circulate the world in seconds—before anyone has the chance to question its authenticity—we realise how fragile visual trust has become. For many, this was a wake-up call. For Marco Ramilli, the founder of IdentifAI, it was a call to action.

We’re proud to lead IdentifAI’s €5 million funding round, joining the team once again after having led their seed round in 2024. We believed in their vision early on, and today we’re doubling down—because the company has not only delivered on its technological roadmap, but also demonstrated impressive traction, market demand, and the ability to attract world-class talent.

Founded in Italy and already expanding across Europe and into the US, IdentifAI is building a platform to detect whether images, video, or audio content have been generated or manipulated by AI. Their technology is designed to operate in real-time, at scale, with a high degree of precision. It’s already being used by companies that want to ensure the authenticity of what they see—and what they share.

The need is urgent. As generative AI becomes an integral part of the internet’s infrastructure, the ability to verify content will become foundational. A recent report from UNCTAD estimates that the AI market will grow from $189 billion in 2023 to $4.8 trillion by 2033. In parallel, public concern is growing: according to Deloitte, nearly 70% of people familiar with generative AI worry about being deceived by synthetic content. Almost 60% say they can’t reliably tell what’s real anymore.

IdentifAI addresses this challenge at its root. The team brings together expertise in cybersecurity, finance, and frontier AI research. Marco Ramilli, a cybersecurity researcher and entrepreneur with experience in offensive security and malware analysis for the US government, leads technology development. Marco Castaldo, with a long career in international finance, drives the company’s business and growth strategy.

Since our initial investment, IdentifAI has made significant strides—not just on the product front, but in building an international team with deep industry experience. Strategic hires in both commercial and technical roles have positioned the company to engage with partners across sectors and markets.

Their background shows in the product. IdentifAI’s platform is built with the mindset of a security lab: it assumes bad actors will try to bypass detection, and it adapts accordingly. The system can spin up new detectors as new generative models appear. It works across images, video, and voice. It offers detection tailored to specific use cases—finance, insurance, and media—and returns results quickly, including forensic indicators when needed.

We were impressed not only by the technology, but by the vision. IdentifAI is not trying to chase every possible AI use case. It focuses on one of the most immediate and impactful problems of the generative era: the erosion of certainty in digital content. That clarity of focus, combined with a platform already validated by market demand, convinced us to reinvest.

With this round, the company will continue to develop its detection engine, expand its reach in Europe and the US, and strengthen its partnerships across various industries. The momentum is clear, and the mission is more relevant than ever.

At United Ventures, we believe deeptech can offer powerful answers to the challenges created by rapid technological change. But progress without trust is unstable. That’s why we’re excited to support IdentifAI as partners in building a more transparent digital future.

Because if the question is whether something is real, we all deserve to know the answer.

Always a night from old to new!
Night and the healing balm of sleep!
Each morn is New Year’s morn come true,
Morn of a festival to keep.

In her poem "New Year's Morning," Helen Hunt Jackson reflects on how each morning can be a celebration of the New Year. I’ll take those lines as an inspiration to embrace this new year as one of continuous, surprising beginnings 🫶

But, well, a new year has begun, and we hope you’re entering it with a refreshed body and mind. Today, we’re sharing a roundup of our activities from the second half of 2024, including highlights such as our latest investments in Volume, Stema, and IdentifAI.

The United Ventures team journeyed across the continent, seeking the best dealflow and working closely with our portfolio founders and teams. We’re fortunate to have such an intense and rewarding job—it’s a privilege to do what we do.

Read on for all the details, along with our top content picks (articles and podcasts) and three book recommendations to kickstart your "read more" resolution for the new year. 📖

With gratitude and our warmest wishes for a healthy and prosperous 2025,

The United Ventures Team

Subscribe now

Latest Investments

Volume: Driving payment fees to zero

United Ventures led a $6M funding round for UK fintech startup Volume, with participation from Fabrick (Sella Group), Firstminute Capital, SeedX, and Haatch. Volume aims to reduce high transaction fees charged by providers like PayPal and Stripe with its Account-to-Account (A2A) payment solution, lowering fees from 2–8% to under 1%. This approach eliminates card networks, offering faster, cheaper, and more secure payments.

Founded by payments veterans Simone Martinelli and Chris Tarnawski, Volume boasts a skilled team, including hires from Curve, iZettle, and Luno. With global A2A payments surpassing $525B in 2022 and regulatory changes favoring bank-to-bank payments, demand for their solution is growing. The funding will support Volume’s European expansion, UK FCA regulation, and open banking innovation. Read more on TechCrunch.

Stema: The career copilot for engineers

In October, we led a €1.6 million seed round for HR tech startup Stema, joined by Eden Ventures, Club degli Investitori, and Octopus Ventures. Stema revolutionizes STEM recruitment with its AI-powered platform that automates hiring for technical roles. Acting as a “career copilot,” it provides engineers with personalized conversations and tailored career guidance typically reserved for executives.

Founded by Vito Lomele, Davide Bodini, and Matteo Gambera, the team combines expertise in technology, product development, and recruitment. With this funding, Stema aims to enhance its AI platform, grow its team, and expand its European presence.

IdentifAI: Verifying authenticity in the digital world

In September, we led IdentifAI’s €2.2 million seed round to support their mission of combating the rising threat of deepfakes in an AI-driven world. Deepfakes—AI-generated, hyperrealistic media—threaten politics, financial markets, and personal lives by blurring truth and fiction.

Founded in 2024 by Marco Ramilli and Marco Castaldo, IdentifAI uses innovative "degenerative" AI technology to detect and expose manipulated content in images, videos, and audio. As one of Italy’s first deepfake detection companies, IdentifAI serves media, government, and financial services, aligning with our commitment to mitigating the harmful impacts of artificial intelligence.

Portfolio Highlights

xFarm Technologies raises €36M 🚜

In October, xFarm Technologies raised €36M in Series C funding, led by Partech’s Impact Growth Fund, with participation from Mouro Capital, Swisscom Ventures, and United Ventures. The funding will fuel expansion across Europe, Latin America, India, Turkey, and the US, furthering its leadership in agricultural digitization.

Founded by farmer-turned-entrepreneur Matteo Vanotti, xFarm has grown significantly, including a €17M Series B in 2022 and recent acquisitions of Greenfield Technologies (Spain) and SpaceSense (France). Its platform now supports over 490,000 farms managing 7 million hectares globally with tools for sustainable, data-driven farming.

The new funding will enhance regenerative agriculture technologies, geospatial AI, and data analytics. xFarm Technologies was also recently recognized as Startupitalia's best startup of the year at SIOS24 🤩

D-Orbit raises €150M 🛰️

In September, we reaffirmed our support for D-Orbit by participating in their €150 million (US$166 million) Series C funding round, led by Marubeni Corporation, as leaders of a consortium including the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the European Investment Fund (EIF).

D-Orbit, a leader in sustainable space logistics, will use this funding to advance space cloud computing, in-orbit servicing, and circular economy initiatives. The company also aims to strengthen partnerships, expand its customer base, and pursue strategic acquisitions.

In addition to the funding, D-Orbit had a notable year, launching a joint venture in the U.S. and securing a major contract with the European Space Agency for in-orbit servicing. Founder and CEO Luca Rossettini was recognized by la Repubblica as one of the top ten figures shaping the Italian economy for 2024.

Other portfolio news

🔋⚡ Electra Vehicles is expanding globally and advancing sustainability, e-mobility, and electrification. With the EU Battery Passport regulation approaching, the company has launched EVE-Ai – EAGLE Battery Pass, a solution designed for both compliance and competitive advantage. Electra's technology offers predictive maintenance, risk analysis, and end-of-life planning to help businesses extend battery life, reduce costs, and improve efficiency.

The company is now live on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace, making adoption easier. Electra is also showcasing battery innovation at CES 2025. Visitors can experience their new in-vehicle demo, the Cyberbeast, featuring cutting-edge AI software, at Booth #4974 | LVCC West Hall.

💰 Another milestone for Moneyfarm as they continue their international expansion: our portfolio company has acquired 100% of Willis Owen, a UK-based investment platform with a legacy dating back to 1982. This marks Moneyfarm’s third major acquisition in just three years, following the integration of Wealthsimple’s UK customer base and the digital pension adviser Profile Pensions. With this latest step, Moneyfarm surpasses €6 billion in assets under management and serves over 160,000 clients worldwide.

🟣 In 2024, Aindo introduced new features to its platform, including Differential Privacy, Data Rebalancing, and synthetic data generation from prompts powered by pre-trained large language models (LLMs). They launched an enhanced platform version with improved UX/UI, streamlined deployment, and expanded automation capabilities. In Q4, Aindo's market leadership gained further recognition with two mentions in Gartner reports.

Last but not least, it was great to see many of United Ventures' portfolio companies featured in Sifted’s 250 Europe Leaderboard, which recognized the fastest-growing European startups based on revenue growth. Congrats to Fiscozen, Exein, Mishipay, and all the other companies on the list 🏅

News from the Team

👋 Please join us in welcoming Francesca Perrotti to the UV team!

Francesca joined in September 2024 to lead Corporate & Legal Affairs, bringing extensive experience in corporate law and financial compliance. She ensures the firm meets all regulatory requirements, manages internal procedures, and oversees corporate secretarial activities. Additionally, Francesca works closely with outsourced control functions and ensures compliance with privacy and workplace safety regulations.

Before joining United Ventures, Francesca worked as a financial advisor, with law firms specializing in corporate law and AML, and as a legal consultant for financial intermediaries, deepening her expertise in the economic and regulatory landscape.

In the Press 🗞

The opportunity for industrial sectors

A key topic today is Europe’s role in the tech revolution driven by artificial intelligence. Rather than comparing directly to the United States, Europe could take a unique path, focusing on industry, sector-specific applications, infrastructure, and data protection. In Luca Salvioli's article for Il Sole 24 Ore, Massimiliano emphasizes the need for a medium-to-long-term strategic vision without getting fixated on creating a national champion. The real challenge is to develop vertical applications with secure data and interoperability as a new value chain emerges, with some Italian companies, including startups, potentially playing a key role.

Fostering European deeptech innovation: A VC perspective

Investments in European deeptech startups have tripled over the last five years. Yet challenges remain, as only a few countries have ecosystems capable of supporting a company’s growth from start to finish. We need to capitalize on every stage, aiming to foster European tech consolidators that can scale these initiatives in the medium to long term.

Read more in Luca Zorloni's article for Wired Italia, including Massimiliano’s reflections on the essence of what drives European deeptech startups.

The State of Startups in Italy

In his article on Money.it, Jacopo Paoletti highlights the recent developments in Italy’s startup scene, focusing on the Centemero law and the 2024 “DDL Concorrenza”. These important legislative changes, shaped through collaboration among public, private, and institutional sectors, are designed to strengthen Italy’s competitiveness in today’s fast-moving global market. United Ventures' commentary highlights the potential these reforms hold to unlock crucial resources for emerging tech startups. We believe that venture capital is not only a way to generate strong returns and diversify portfolios but also a powerful engine for driving economic growth, offering long-term value and lasting impact.

Pods 🎙️

Attracting growth capital and generating DPI in European Venture

EUVC | The European VC

United Ventures' Massimiliano Magrini on attracting growth capital and generating DPI in European Venture

In this episode of the EUVC podcast, Andreas talks with Massimiliano Magrini, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at United Ventures…

Listen now

2 years ago · 2 likes

Recently, Massimiliano joined on the podcast to discuss why Europe's venture ecosystem stands at a critical inflection point.

Key insights from the discussion:

👉 Unlike the US market, where Big Tech companies serve as natural consolidators, Europe is still developing its ecosystem of large-scale acquirers - a dynamic that fundamentally influences exit strategies and growth paths;

👉 The European growth stage, predominantly led by PE firms focused on profitability, offers a distinct contrast to the US VC model's emphasis on high-growth potential;

👉 A big shift in US investment focus from Asian markets to Europe is creating new opportunities for transatlantic collaboration;

👉 Europe's unique landscape presents exciting opportunities in sustainable digitization, enterprise software, and deeptech - key focus areas for United Ventures.

Massimiliano’s core messages resonate beyond market dynamics: Successful venture capital requires balancing deep expertise with openness to discoveries while never forgetting our broader responsibility to society. People remain at the core, beyond the thesis. This philosophy continues to guide United Ventures' investment approach.

Share

Exploring ESG in Venture Capital

I (Giulia) recently joined Laura Iriarte Zabalaga on Zero One Hundred's ESG & Impact Talks podcast to discuss the growing significance of ESG in venture capital and United Ventures' efforts to integrate ESG principles into its operations. 

Our conversation explored how my role has evolved to include comms and ESG, the ESG challenges faced by a fund like United Ventures, and the industry’s rapid shift in response to regulatory changes and rising ESG expectations. We also delved into the firm’s SFDR Article 8 fund, the balance between meaningful engagement with portfolio companies and providing robust data for LPs, and why a strong ESG framework is transformative for venture capital funds. Give it a listen, and let me know your thoughts! 😊

New Year reads ☕️ 📖

Three recommended books from the team explore how human decisions within powerful systems—algorithms, technologies, or corporations—shape and impact society.

Mariarosaria Taddeo, The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Defence

Mariarosaria Taddeo, an independent director on United Ventures’ Board of Directors, is an Oxford scholar on the ethical implications of emerging technologies. Her book, The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Defence, addresses the challenge of leveraging AI advancements in defence safely, ethically, and effectively. It presents a systematic framework that combines AI ethics and Just War theory, offering actionable recommendations for policymakers and practitioners. The book explores real-world applications, including intelligence analysis, cyber warfare, and autonomous weapons, while emphasizing the importance of ethical governance and responsible AI use in defence.

Diletta Huyskes, Tecnologia della Rivoluzione (italian edition)

In Tecnologia della Rivoluzione, Diletta Huyskes explores the intersection of technological progress and social justice, revealing how algorithms can perpetuate and amplify societal injustices. Through the story of Sara—a migrant, unemployed, and single mother unfairly labeled as a potential criminal by an algorithm—Huyskes illustrates how social identities are often reduced to data points, with profound consequences.

The book traces the history of technology, from bicycles to AI, emphasizing how every innovation reflects human values and decisions that can lead to social exclusion. Drawing on feminist insights from the 1970s to the 2000s, Huyskes encourages critical reflection on steering technological revolutions toward positive social change. It is an interesting read for those interested in the ethical implications of technology and its societal impact.

William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

William Dalrymple’s book examines the unchecked power of corporations through the rise of the British East India Company, a cautionary tale with enduring relevance. Starting as a small London-based joint-stock company with just 35 employees and a royal charter to "wage war," it grew into a global superpower. Over two centuries, it amassed immense wealth, controlled vast territories, and commanded a private army larger than many national forces, all without democratic or constitutional oversight.

Dalrymple highlights the company’s influence abroad and at home, where it undermined emerging democratic principles through systemic corruption and conflicts of interest. This narrative reminds us of the dangers concentrated corporate power poses to democracy and offers vital insights into modern global capitalism.

Share

That’s all for today!

Thanks for reading United Ventures’ newsletter. Stay tuned for more updates, and follow us on LinkedIn.

PS. Have you enjoyed this newsletter? We would love to hear your feedback ❤️ Please feel free to share any questions or thoughts you may have. Just drop us a comment below!

If you know someone who might like this newsletter, forward it and point them to https://unitedventures.substack.com/subscribe so they can sign up for it.

____________

Just like that, August has started, summer is in full swing, and here we are to wrap up the recent months at United Ventures, which have been rich with news about our amazing portfolio companies. Among the key highlights, which you will find detailed below:

• We invested in Avaneidi

• We celebrated a major exit, with Fiscozen receiving a strategic investment from Visma

• Futura and Exein secured new funding rounds with international investors

• xFarm Technologies is making strides towards becoming the European leader in agritech

Plus, we have special summer reading suggestions with an Olympics twist 🏋️‍♂️

Best wishes for a relaxing and recharging holiday season, and stay tuned because we’ve been working on a few exciting deals that we can’t wait to disclose 🔜

The United Ventures Team

🫧 New Investments

In June, we announced our investment in Avaneidi, leading their €8M Series A funding round. Avaneidi is revolutionizing enterprise storage with a focus on robust security and sustainability—a critical need as AI becomes increasingly central to business operations. Their innovative approach addresses one of the main bottlenecks to wider AI adoption: secure and efficient data management.

Data fuels artificial intelligence, and secure storage and management are crucial when dealing with sensitive information. Avaneidi's advancements in storage technology deliver exceptional performance, enhance security, and reduce energy consumption. We firmly believe that data security and governance are fundamental to the responsible development of AI. While large language models often dominate the conversation, secure physical data storage, especially sensitive information, is essential.

Avaneidi's founder, Rino Micheloni, has over thirty years of experience in the semiconductor industry and is one of the world's foremost experts in flash memory technology and solid-state drives. We're excited to partner with Rino and his team to empower organizations to leverage AI technology confidently, knowing their data is managed securely and responsibly.

🦪 Exits

In April, our portfolio company, Fiscozen, secured a strategic investment from Visma, a leading European software provider with over €2Bn in annual revenues. This marked a successful exit for United Ventures, allowing us to return capital to our investors with a more than gratifying multiple. But we are even more happy because this deal also reinforces the strength of Italy's tech ecosystem, attracting significant international investment and encouraging further growth.

Fiscozen’s mission has always been to simplify the complexities of tax management for freelancers and small businesses, empowering them to focus more on what they do best. With Visma's support, Fiscozen is set to enhance its offerings and extend its reach, ensuring that more “Partite IVA” can navigate the often daunting world of tax bureaucracy with ease and peace of mind.

All credit goes to Enrico Mattiazzi, a former team member at United Ventures who bravely transitioned from investor to entrepreneur, and Vito Lomele. Enrico and Vito's vision and leadership have been crucial in Fiscozen's success, guiding the company towards impressive business results and fostering one of Italy's best startup company cultures.

🐚 Portfolio Highlights

A couple of weeks ago, Exein announced its €15M Series B. The round was led by 33N Ventures, a specialized cybersecurity and infrastructure software investor, with participation from new investor Partech. United Ventures, eCAPITAL, and Future Industry Ventures also continued their support as existing investors. TechCrunch has more here.

Exein provides advanced embedded security for the rapidly growing Internet of Things (IoT). Manufacturers need seamless, robust security solutions in a world where connected devices are ubiquitous—from homes and cars to critical infrastructure. Exein delivers precisely that, leveraging cutting-edge AI to protect over 80 million IoT devices daily across the industrial, automotive, and aerospace sectors.

Exein's success story perfectly exemplifies our investment thesis: identifying and supporting transformative technologies before they hit the mainstream. When we first invested in Exein in 2018, embedded security was a niche concern, largely overlooked. Today, its critical importance is undeniable.

This latest funding will fuel Exein's ambitious global expansion plans, including new US and Asian offices (with a new Taipei office driving growth in the region) and a projected doubling of its headcount within the next year. We're looking forward to our continued partnership with Gianni Cuozzo and the entire Exein team as they set the global standard for embedded cybersecurity and make the digital world safer. 

In May, Futura successfully raised €14M in Series A funding. This marks the largest round in EdTech in Italy, led by Eurazeo and joined by Axon Partners Group. As an existing investor, we have doubled down on our investment in Futura following our Seed investment in 2022.

Futura, founded in 2020 by Andrea Chirolli, Francesco Salvatore, and Lorenzo Pinto, develops algorithms that personalize and optimize learning trajectories. The company's innovative adaptive learning platform uses AI to create tailored study plans and simulations based on each student's unique profile and needs—a personalized approach to education that helps bridge preparation gaps and makes high-quality education affordable and accessible for all students.

With this new round of funding, Futura will accelerate its growth and further establish itself as a leader in the EdTech space, expanding its personalized learning solutions across Europe and building a robust ecosystem focused on educational excellence. The future of education is bright, and we believe Futura is at the forefront of this exciting new era.

xFarm Technologies has successfully integrated Greenfield Technologies, a Spanish company specializing in soil characterization to optimize crop management, and SpaceSense, a French startup providing climate intelligence services using satellite data and AI. These operations reinforce xFarm Technologies' position in regenerative agriculture and geospatial AI, enabling the company to create new value and contribute to the agri-food industry at a pan-European level.

This represents a significant acceleration in xFarm's international expansion, which began two years ago with its presence in the Iberian Peninsula and continued into France, Germany, and Poland. An even larger, more international, specialized team will now support this growth.

Agriculture is a critical sector in Europe and globally, employing millions of people and feeding us all every day. We are proud to be on xFarm's side as they accompany farms worldwide on their digital transition and lead toward more sustainable agriculture. Huge congratulations to Matteo Vanotti, Matteo Cunial, and the entire xFarm Technologies team on the amazing work they are doing; welcome Miguel Córdoba Pérez, Abel Francisco Paz Gallardo, Jyotsna Budideti, and Sami Yacoubi.

🪸 Other portfolio news

Aindo, which we backed last October by leading their €6M Series A funding, continues to make strides in AI deployment across healthcare, finance, and public administration. Their synthetic data platform tackles one of the most significant hurdles in AI deployment: the lack of extensive and unbiased data. Aindo generates privacy-compliant and bias-free synthetic data, enhancing AI model accuracy and overcoming data scarcity.

A recent milestone is Aindo's Europrivacy™/® certification. They are the first company certified under this scheme for generating synthetic data in the healthcare sector. This certification recognizes Aindo's dedication to protecting personal data while supporting transparency and fairness in processing activities. With this certification, Aindo’s synthetic data technology can drive innovation in healthcare and pharmaceutical research while ensuring full privacy compliance. 

Fraud is evolving, but fraud management isn't keeping pace. As financial interactions move online, the risk of cyber-fraud is increasing, driven by real-time payments and sophisticated hacking techniques. Cybercriminals continuously find new ways to compromise digital systems, causing significant financial and reputational damage. Cleafy, which we backed last year with a €10M round, has developed an innovative fraud prevention software solution to address this challenge.

What sets Cleafy apart is its adaptability and ability to monitor all digital channels, including web apps, mobile apps, and open banking. This provides proactive defense against even the most sophisticated attacks. Cleafy detects and prevents fraud in real-time using advanced machine learning algorithms and behavioral analytics.

For example, in July, Cleafy announced the discovery of a new Medusa Android banking Trojan variant. This sophisticated malware represents a significant threat to global cybersecurity, evading detection with advanced tactics and targeting financial institutions worldwide. Medusa is identified in multiple regions and poses a severe risk to financial institutions and their customers. Cleafy’s Threat Intelligence Team released an in-depth report on this new variant, revealing its compact and efficient nature. Fox News also reported Cleafy’s analysis, highlighting the urgent need for advanced, adaptive security measures.

Entando has signed a strategic collaboration with the Ministry of Investment, Regional Development, and Informatization (MIRRI) and the National Agency for Networking and Electronic Services (NASES) of the Slovak Republic to support Slovakia’s ambitious digital transformation strategy. The Entando platform has been adopted for its ability to support a composable architecture that aligns with modern needs for flexibility and scalability in digital solutions.

GovTech, using technology to enhance and transform public services, is a critical area of focus for driving efficiency, transparency, and citizen-centric government operations. As the European Union prioritizes digital transformation as a pillar of sustainable growth, it's great to see portfolio companies like Entando Inc. supporting these initiatives. Congratulations to the Entando team on this important partnership!

Last but not least, it was gret to see many of United Ventures' portfolio companies featured in Sifted’s 50 Southern Europe Leaderboard, recognizing the fastest-growing startups in the region based on revenue growth. Congrats to Fiscozen, Exein, Babaco Market, Trustfull, and all the other companies on the list 🏅

🎪 Events

In June, United Ventures had the pleasure of collaborating on the Fondazione NOVA Reunion 2024 in the beautiful setting of the IBM Studios in Milan. The event focused on the theme of "artificial humanism," with a series of speeches exploring the question: in an era of rapid technological progress, how can we ensure that innovation is driven by values and nurtured by a new generation of talent?

We were inspired by Prof. Enrico Zio, scientific director at Datrix, as he discussed the concept of "artificial humanism" and the risks and opportunities that technological advancements pose; we heard the stories of Enrico Mattiazzi (Fiscozen), Daniele Panfilo (Aindo), Federico Sforza (Banca AideXa); we discussed the VC mindset, ready to explore uncharted territory, the evolution of the European VC landscape, and the shifts created by AI in tech investing in a chat featuring Pietro Sella (Sella group) and Carlotta Riganti (Balderton Capital); we reflected on the evolution of corporate leadership in the age of AI with insights from tech CEOs Irene Boni (Talent Garden), Lorenzo Cerulli (Deloitte), Vittorio Martinelli (Olympus Italy), and Stefano Rebattoni (IBM Italy). We made lasting connections.

Thank you to all the speakers who shared their experiences with us, the participants, and especially the students and mentees at the core of Fondazione NOVA's mission. 

📅 Save the date for two upcoming events to meet with the United Ventures team this fall

• Italian Tech Week in Turin from September 25 to 27. We look forward to meeting old and new friends at the most important gathering for the Italian technology ecosystem. This year's edition promises to be exceptional—get your ticket before they sell out!

• 0100 Conference Mediterranean in Milan from October 28 to 30. This international private equity and venture capital conference brings together fund investors and managers interested in the Mediterranean region. We will discuss on-stage venture fundraising, its key drivers and challenges, and LP-GP dynamics.

🏊 Beach reads

A handful of reading suggestions inspired by the day's hot topics: AI and the Olympics.

AI is omnipresent in tech discourse, but did you know it's also transforming world sports? The Olympic Games have embraced AI, with a governance and oversight framework to identify and mitigate risks.

In Nicholas Thompson’s newsletter, I discovered that AI helps athletes with everything from optimal strategies for corner kicks to the highest-scoring way to ride a wave to analyzing the characteristics of an arrow in flight. Some of the most exciting research uses AI to identify young talents who may become future Olympians.

A Nature article explores three ways AI is changing the Olympic Games:

• Athlete performance and training: AI enhances performance by designing custom athletic shoes and optimizing nutrition and training schedules. The roots of using technology to study athletes trace back to 1900 when French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey used high-speed chronophotography to capture athletes in motion.

• Refereeing decisions: AI helps referees make accurate decisions, even in challenging conditions like water polo. Olympics water polo referee Frank Ohme, an astrophysicist, uses AI in his day job to hunt for signals of colliding black holes and applies similar precision in officiating.

• Personalized highlights: AI could provide personalized highlights, making future broadcasts more engaging. Computer-vision AI platforms may soon offer viewers tailored highlight reels.

A side story that caught my interest in the last few days is the widespread criticism around Google’s “Dear Sydney” Olympic ad, which uses AI to help a father write a fan letter. This raises concerns about a future dominated by homogenized modes of expression, where AI erodes the richness of human language and culture. Shelly Palmer puts it well:

For a deeper dive into AI's future, check out Leopold Aschenbrenner’s tech essay “Situational Awareness.” Aschenbrenner, a former researcher at OpenAI, explores the trajectory toward Artificial General Intelligence and eventual superintelligence, offering a thoughtful analysis of the challenge of aligning machines with human values and needs.

👀 ICYMI

The recent CrowdStrike outage exposed a critical weakness in our digital world: over-reliance on centralized systems. While centralization has driven incredible technological progress, can we afford to build upon a foundation that is so vulnerable to disruption? This vulnerability demands we explore a different path: embracing decentralization and pushing control and intelligence closer to users for a more resilient and secure internet.

We've championed this shift for the past decade, investing in companies building a decentralized future as an alternative to established, centralized models. Companies like MainStreaming (proprietary streaming services), Exein (decentralized security), and Avaneidi (on-premise data storage) exemplify this commitment.

Transitioning to a decentralized future requires rethinking our approach to digital infrastructure. But the potential benefits—increased resilience, enhanced security, and greater user control—are too significant to ignore. The CrowdStrike outage highlights the need for a more distributed and secure digital future. You can learn more about our investment thesis in our blog post: A Wake-Up Call for a Decentralized Future.

Earlier this year, Massimiliano Magrini joined Aarish Shah on Nothing Ventured, a podcast highlighting stories and challenges within the tech and venture ecosystem. 

The conversation covered topics such as Massimiliano's early career founding the Italian offices of Altavista and Google, and his transition to venture capital, which led to the founding of United Ventures. They discussed the evolution of search engines and how they demonstrated the value of putting tech into consumers’ hands. 

Massimiliano addressed the lack of late-stage funding and growth venture players in Europe, and the mismatch between European policy and private capital. He highlighted the importance of harmonized legislation and best practices and the need for adequate capital availability for Italian startups. The discussion stressed that ecosystems cannot be isolated and must be interconnected.

They discussed the importance of serendipity, balancing capital and founder DNA in venture capital, and why startups are inherently “imperfect.” They also highlighted the importance of encouraging a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship in Europe and the role of personal experience and education in fostering entrepreneurial mindsets.

…and much more. The full podcast delves deeper—give it a listen 🎧

That’s all for today!

Thanks for reading United Ventures’ newsletter. Stay tuned, and follow us on Linkedin or Twitter for more updates.

PS. Have you enjoyed this newsletter? We would love to hear your feedback ❤️ Please feel free to share any questions or thoughts you may have. Just comment below! 

And if you know someone who might like this newsletter, just forward it along and point them to https://unitedventures.substack.com/subscribe so they can sign up for it.

siamo felici di invitarvi alla Reunion 2024 di Fondazione NOVA "The Artificial Humanism: Bilanciare l'impatto dell'innovazione tecnologica per un nuovo paradigma di crescita", in programma il 26 giugno 2024 presso gli IBM Studios di Milano.

Questa edizione si arricchisce di una collaborazione speciale tra Fondazione NOVA e United Ventures, nata dalla condivisione di una visione comune: la passione per l'innovazione e l'impegno per lo sviluppo del talento. Insieme, abbiamo creato un programma di ampio respiro che esplora le tendenze di allocazione del capitale nell'innovazione tecnologica, le implicazioni etiche dell'intelligenza artificiale e molto altro ancora.

Affronteremo queste tematiche con importanti esponenti del mondo istituzionale, imprenditoriale e accademico, analizzando come l'intelligenza artificiale e le altre tecnologie emergenti stiano ridefinendo l’economia e la società, e come sia possibile formare e attrarre i talenti capaci di guidare questa trasformazione.

Scopri gli speaker e l'agenda

La Reunion di Fondazione NOVA è un'occasione preziosa di networking, di confronto di idee e di raccolta fondi per sostenere la missione no-profit di valorizzazione dei giovani talenti e la creazione di un ambiente meritocratico e inclusivo in Italia. È un'opportunità unica per ascoltare storie di imprenditoria innovativa dal portfolio di United Ventures e non solo, riflettendo su come l’innovazione tecnologica possa offrire un nuovo paradigma di crescita per un mondo in continua evoluzione.

Speriamo potrai unirti a noi per una giornata di ispirazione e di impegno per un futuro più equo e sostenibile. Riserva ora il tuo biglietto, i posti sono limitati (il biglietto comprende l'accesso alla conferenza, a tutti i panel e alla cena).

Ultimi posti disponibili

❤️ Grazie per il tuo supporto!

Il team di United Ventures

Fondazione NOVA è un ente no-profit e il ricavato dei biglietti andrà a sostenere il programma Mentors4U, il più ampio programma europeo pro bono di mentorship, dando a tanti giovani la possibilità di crescere professionalmente con il supporto dei mentor. Tutte le donazioni a favore della Fondazione NOVA sono fiscalmente deducibili o detraibili secondo i limiti indicati dalla legge.

Dear All,

It's been a while since the last edition of United Ventures' newsletter, so bear with us if this is going to be a long one!

Last year was an eventful one for this author, who spent most of it enjoying a blissful maternity leave, and for United Ventures, which welcomed many great companies to its portfolio and made important additions to its team. We will bring you through the most significant moments of the year that just ended, and we will share an AI-themed selection of readings that sparked our curiosity over the last few months.

Now, onto 2023 and the challenges ahead. With the conviction that today more than ever, the tech industry must focus on business fundamentals and on solving big, real-world problems.

Best wishes to us all for a year full of energy, creativity, and growth 💫

Iscriviti adesso

New Investments

🥕 In November, we led the €6.3m Series A round of Babaco Market, the subscription service that saves ugly&odd foods from suppliers and delivers weekly unordinary boxes directly to customers’ homes. Did you know that 88m tons of food is wasted in the EU annually, and 26.4m tons is wasted at the production and processing level, where Babaco Market works? The company recovers imperfect fruit and vegetables that would have otherwise gone to waste, creating a more efficient and equitable food system for farmers as well as for customers looking for healthier, more sustainable, and more affordable choices.

⚙️ We led the €5.3m Series A round of Zerynth, the industrial tech startup building an IoT platform that helps companies connect industrial machines and optimize industrial processes. Although IoT projects are maturing, manufacturing companies keep facing several challenges in the digitalization and integration process, such as legacy equipment, technical complexities, and security issues. This is where Zerynth comes in, providing a complete end-to-end, hardware–software IoT solution to enable the digital transformation of any industrial process.

🪂 In July, we backed the journey of insurtech Wallife beyond the boundaries of risk by leading their €12M Series A round. Founded in 2020 and based in Rome, Wallife develops innovative insurance products focused on protecting individuals from new and emerging risks arising from technological and scientific progress, namely in the areas of genetics, biometrics, and biohacking. Its mission is visionary and ambitious: building the first company in the world able to provide answers about safety and protection from still unknown risks.

☁️ We invested in Fido and led their €5M Series A. Fido operates in the identity verification sector and aims to unlock the power of digital footprints. Through the use of proprietary machine learning algorithms, Fido provides online user evaluation models for companies of all sizes and for different applications: credit rating, fraud prevention, KYC & AML, and lead qualification. The analysis and use in full compliance with the rules of digital footprints is a crucial point for all companies in every sector - and Fido’s solution has the potential to become an international standard.

👩‍🏫 Also in July, we invested in Futura, an ed-tech startup, founded in 2020 by three under-25s, that develops artificial intelligence models to revolutionize the study process. Futura leverages its AI-powered platform to test the skills of each individual student and automatically create a personalized study path that updates as learning progresses. Their €1.8 million round is the largest seed investment in the education sector in Italy and is fueling the company’s ambitious project to become the benchmark in the European test preparation and tutoring market.

During Q1’22, we also announced two companies that joined the portfolio of UV T-Growth, our fund boosting the growth of exceptional founders and companies operating in large technology sectors: 🛰️ D-Orbit, the first company addressing the logistics needs of the space market, committed to helping companies profitably and sustainably maximize the opportunities to do business in space today and into the future; and 🛒 Everli, Europe’s leading online grocery marketplace, on a mission to help its diverse customer base to achieve peace of mind, by simplifying their life when shopping for groceries.

Portfolio highlights

🎮 In January ‘22, we announced the successful exit of our portfolio company FaceIT, the premier platform for gamers to compete in their favorite games. The company has been acquired along with ESL Gaming by Savvy Gaming Group, resulting in a multiple of 7,4x for our investors. In conjunction with the acquisition, the two companies merged to create the world's largest competitive gaming platform under the name ESL FACEIT Group. Learn more about our journey with FaceIT in our blog post and in this interview with Massimiliano Magrini by Beniamino Pagliaro.

🏦 Also in January, Moneyfarm announced a £44.1 (€53M) Series D funding round led by M&G plc and participated by Poste Italiane + a commercial partnership with M&G for the launch of an innovative, digital product aimed at the next generation of retail customers in the UK. In December, it announced the acquisition of Profile Pensions, the UK’s leading digital pension adviser - a deal that marks another step in the international expansion of Moneyfarm and drives the company's AUM to more than 3.8 billion euros for more than 115,000 customers.

🇫🇷 In June, Young Platform raised a €16 million Series B round led by Azimut, one of the leading independent asset managers in Europe, to simplify access to the world of cryptocurrencies. The funding is supporting Young's development plans, starting with the consolidation of the team with the best talent from technology and finance and the geographic expansion into new markets such as Spain and France. A few days ago, Young Platform announced it obtained an operating license from the French financial markets authority (AMF), confirming the soundness of a model that protects users. 

🎶 In July, Musixmatch announced a significant investment from TPG, a leading global alternative asset management firm. For eight years, we’ve held the privilege of actively partnering with Musixmatch’s founders on their mission to build the world’s largest lyrics catalog and enhance the experience of music worldwide. Now that the company has welcomed new investors and begun a new phase of its journey, we congratulate the whole team for the hard work it took to reach this milestone and the ongoing vision that will drive Musixmatch from here. Can’t wait to see what’s ahead!

🚜 In August, xFarm Technologies secured one of Europe’s largest Series B funding rounds in the agtech sector, raising €17 million. Back in 2019, we invested in xFarm because we believed it would become the reference platform for farmers who want to manage their farms digitally and were inspired by the vision to make agriculture sustainable through innovation. Today, xFarm Technologies simplifies the work of 110.000 farms spread over 1.5 million hectares in more than 100 countries around the world. 

🍽️ Also in August, Deliveristo closed a €7 million investment round to support the company’s consolidation of the Italian market, its expansion in Europe, and the launch of new services for customers and suppliers, from data-driven marketing to payments services. Deliveristo is building a digital market where restaurateurs can find everything they need and order in the simplest and fastest possible way.

🧑‍💻 In December, Fiscozen announced an €8 million raise of additional funding led by Keen Venture Partners with United Ventures’ participation to push its mission to eliminate tax bureaucracy in Italy for all individual businesses, from lawyers to digital workers to small shop owners. Since raising the first €3 million round in early 2020, Fiscozen has seen exponential growth and now works with thousands of happy customers.

News from the Team

2022 was a year of meaningful additions for United Ventures. With regard to the investment team, we’ve been joined by Jacopo Drudi, as portfolio operating partner, and Riccardo Coletta, as portfolio operating manager.

A senior investment professional, Jacopo leverages his industry experience to solve problems facing portfolio companies, focusing on strategic planning, commercial growth, operational efficiency, and financial controls. Before joining United Ventures, he worked in private equity and consulting, gaining an extensive background in M&A.

Riccardo focuses primarily on supporting portfolio companies and sourcing/analyzing new investment opportunities. Before United Ventures, Riccardo was part of the investment team at an Italy-based venture capital firm that invests globally in early-stage companies.

Martina Canarelli is our new executive assistant & office manager. Her enthusiastic and proactive approach ensures everything runs smoothly at United Ventures and supercharges the team’s effectiveness and execution of goals. Previously, Martina gained solid customer service & personal assistant experience in Italy and UK.

Tommaso Palmieri joined us as a full-time data scientist. Tommaso initially joined us for a summer internship in 2021 - now, having completed his mathematics and computer engineering studies at New York University, he is back to take our dealflow to the next level.

Last but not least, Elena Di Maio joined us as fund operations manager to ensure seamless business delivery of fund operations and financial administration activities. Elena has a background in consulting and a double degree in international management from Bocconi and Fudan University in Shanghai.

Things Worth Sharing

Tech insights from the world, trends, perspectives & more.

🤖 Sure enough, we’re in a golden age of progress in artificial intelligence, and Generative AI is the most interesting thing in tech right now. Here are a few food-for-thought essays we’ve been reading lately on the endless possibilities and possible risks of this technology breakthrough.

Dr. Andre Retterath, a partner at Earlybird and author of the weekly newsletter Data-driven VC, recently shared some great insights on What ChatGPT means for the future of startup funding and how VCs can boost 10x their productivity with ChatGPT. Bottom line: Large Language Models will be a fundamental part of the stack, driving startup investing into more efficiency, effectiveness, and inclusiveness.

“With a paintbrush in hand, artificial intelligence has become an engine of wow.” Kevin Kelly authored an optimistic story for Wired, making a very clear prediction: Generative AI will alter how we design just about everything, but not a single human artist will lose their job because of this new technology (as long as they learn to master "the art of prompting").

On a darker note, we need to talk about training data bias, e.g., women uploading their selfies to the Lensa ‘avatar maker’ getting ML-generated nudes back. This story by MIT researcher Melissa Heikkilä is emblematic: her avatars were cartoonishly pornified, while her male colleagues got to be astronauts, explorers, and inventors.

But let’s give the final word to ChatGPT itself, to whom I’ve asked a short poem about venture capital in the style of Emily Dickinson (one of my fav Anglo-American poets):

Venture capital, a curious thing,
A force that makes the impossible spring,
To life and action, like a sudden flame,
It fuels the fire of the entrepreneur's game.
 
With its backing, dreams take flight,
And challenges are faced with all one's might,
Innovation blooms, and progress is made,
All thanks to the power of the venture capital trade.
 
But like a flame, it can be fickle and wild,
For every success, many a failure compiled,
But those who persevere and chase their dreams,
Can reap the rewards of their hard work, it seems.
 
So here's to venture capital,
A catalyst for change and growth,
May it continue to nurture,
The seeds of progress and innovation, from youth.

Frighteningly beautiful, don't you think? Anyway, beyond the media hype and the cool demos, what’s most important is to try to understand all the ways AI is evolving, and what that might mean for our future.

ICYMI

🎤 Between January and September 2022, more than €1.3bn was invested into Milan’s start-ups — an increase of 90% on full-year 2021 figures and beating all previous full-years on record, according to PitchBook Data. Alex Irwin-Hunt, Global Markets Editor at fDi Intelligence, has spoken with many major voices in the local tech ecosystem to understand how and why Milan’s tech scene is finally coming of age and attracting rising levels of venture capital investment. Massimiliano Magrini contributed to this insightful report by sharing his perspective on the current state of play in Milan’s innovation ecosystem and Italy more broadly.

✏️ The December issue of WeWealth featured an in-depth interview with our Sara Lovato on the impact of the current economic and geopolitical scenario on startups globally, the Italian startup ecosystem, how Italy differs from other European countries, the sectors we look at with the most interest, and United Ventures' strategy.

Which areas to focus on, looking at the short and long term? 

Those that have not yet experienced significant digitization and that could instead generate more sustainable, collaborative and efficient processes, increasing industry productivity through agile and comprehensive software applications. The current context certainly leads us to think about the entire energy and supply chain sector; but also on new applications in blockchain and quantum computing, health and the environment.

Share

That’s all for today!

Thanks for reading United Ventures’ newsletter. Stay tuned, and be sure to follow us on Linkedin or Twitter for more updates.

PS. Have you enjoyed this newsletter? We would love to hear your feedback ❤️ Please feel free to share any questions or thoughts you may have. Just drop us a comment below! 

And if you know someone who might like this newsletter, just forward it along and point them to https://unitedventures.substack.com/subscribe so they can sign up for it.

Share United Ventures’ Newsletter

Plenty of stuff happened at United Ventures in the last months, so grab a hot chocolate and let’s dive into the end-of-the-year edition of our newsletter. As we close this year out and look ahead to what 2022 will hold, here’s a recap of what our portfolio companies and we have been up to lately, plus a selection of our favorite readings.

We are moving into a world where tech startups are taking center stage. 2021 was a record-breaking year for European tech by huge margins, but it’s just a step to a much longer journey. Some themes have emerged strongly: the need to make impact a priority, the changing venture landscape, the beginning of the web3 era.

As our journey deepens and widens, we are grateful for what we've achieved together so far, and ready to see what’s next. Stay tuned for an exciting year of United Ventures updates in 2022!

Wishing you and yours a healthy and amazing new year,

The United Ventures Team

Subscribe now

Portfolio highlights

🔔 Datrix went public with Euronext Growth Milan

“In a world where digital transformation is no more a nice-to-have, but a matter of survival, the data-driven approach enabled by Artificial Intelligence can make the difference for many companies – and the need for companies like Datrix is more urgent than ever.”

On December 3rd, our portfolio company Datrix underwent its anticipated IPO and is now listed on Euronext Growth Milan under the ticker “DATA”. The news marks an important milestone in the company’s progress and a huge validation of the original vision of founders Fabrizio Milano d’Aragona, Mauro Arte, and Claudio Zamboni, who decided to start Datrix because they were deeply convinced of the value of data to facilitate better decisions by companies of all sizes and consequently accelerate business growth. Read more on Datrix’s journey on our blog.

🚀 Exein closed an international €6M Series A funding round

After partnering with Exein in 2018, as the first investor in the company, we continued our commitment to the team and their huge impact on the cybersecurity industry by participating in their international €6 million Series A, which was announced in September. The round was co-led by Future Industry Ventures, an investment fund dedicated to the future of manufacturing and advised by VC experts Redstone, and eCAPITAL, a German independent VC firm focusing on early-stage deep tech investments. 

The fresh round of funding is fuelling the company’s architectural product expansion that will bring Exein capabilities also to other markets such as Industrial IoT, Automotive and Medical IoT, as well as the several tech hirings needed to cope with growing traction. Congratulations Gianni Cuozzo and team on this important milestone!

🧑‍🌾 xFarm joined forces with Farm Technologies

In November, our portfolio company xFarm joined forces with Farm Technologies to create xFarmTechnologies. With 80,000 farms and 1 million hectares under management, xFarm Technologies becomes the leading company in the Italian agtech market and among the top five in Europe, responding to the growing demand for sustainability and technological innovation of the agri-food supply chain. We are excited to continue working alongside Matteo Vanotti, Matteo Cunial, and the entire xFarm Technologies team, as they continue to push the digital transformation of agriculture.

🤝 Cloud4Wi acquired location technology provider Geo-Uniq

Cloud4Wi announced its acquisition of French-headquartered GeoUniq, a leading provider of cutting-edge location technology and data. Through the acquisition, Cloud4Wi and its clients gain immediate access to one of the world’s most innovative location engines. Together, the companies are poised for a phase of rapid growth as they help clients minimize the divide between the physical and digital customer journey. 

🎵 Musixmatch partnered with Spotify, bringing lyrics anywhere

Launched last November, Spotify’s new Lyrics feature, powered by Musixmatch, empowers millions of fans around the world to cultivate an even deeper connection to the music and artists they love, diving into the deeper meanings behind each song. The global partnership expands on a prior deal Spotify had with Musixmatch to offer lyrics to users in India, Latin America and Southeast Asia. TechCrunch has more here.

News from the Team

We are happy to announce that Caterina Lurani joined United Ventures as Investment Manager!

Prior to joining United Ventures, Caterina spent three years in a fast-growing digital healthcare startup based in Milan, lastly as Head of Business Intelligence. Her goal was to enable the company to be entirely data-driven — a fascinating project involving both building data infrastructures and defining strategic measures to drive growth and develop new businesses.

Caterina holds a summa cum laude MSc in Economics from Bocconi University in Milan. During her studies she has been a Research Assistant in projects promoted by top-rank US universities, focusing on mathematical and statistical models. She specialized in using complex mathematical frameworks to interpret social topics, ranging from immigration and integration to political science.

A true nature enthusiast, Caterina is a sailing and alpinism instructor, but she also enjoys rock-climbing, ski touring, and possibly any outdoor activity you can think of! 

These passions fostered her interest towards environmental tech and businesses combining impact and innovation. Finding disruptive solutions to improve our lives captivates her; she’s eager to learn about cutting-edge technologies and meet passionate people.

Welcome, Caterina!

Tech Insights 2021

Since its first edition, United Ventures’ Tech Insights aims to be the place where the investor community meets to discuss the trends shaping the tech industry and the venture capital scenario globally. This year, we organized an afternoon of conversations into the major themes driving the industry forward and a session of company presentations, where exceptional Founders and CEOs from our portfolio shared their stories.

Our co-founders and managing partners Massimiliano Magrini and Paolo Gesess had two insightful fireside chats with Luca Bocchio from Accel and Carlotta “Lotti” Siniscalco from Emergence Capital. In case you missed them, you can watch the recordings at the links below.

In the chat “The hyper-acceleration of digitization”, Massimiliano and Luca discussed the more interesting VC investment trends in Europe and the biggest opportunities in the ecosystem after the great pandemic disruption. We tried to understand with Luca where we are heading from here, which part of the cycle we are at.

In the chat “The quest for impactful returns”, Paolo e Carlotta discussed sustainability and venture capital—subjects that are actually a lot more aligned than most people think. Both are focused on building for the long term; both are focused on building something that will endure.

The 2021 digital edition of Tech Insights was a success and we would like to thank everyone who contributed to making it happen. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did and we are looking forward to meeting you – virtually or in-person – at next year’s edition!

Subscribe now

Things Worth Sharing

Tech insights from the world, trends, perspectives & more.

1. Torrent of words have been written about what seems to be the next big thing of the internet—crypto networks and the web3 era. Thankfully, the team at a16z which is ​​always ahead of the game provides us with curated lists of readings and resources on these topics: don’t miss their Crypto Canon, DAOs Canon and NFT Canon.

2. The VC industry is changing; and the ability to grow big, diversified and tech-savvy financial firms will be the ticket to long-term relevance. One of our favorite contributions on the topic is Mark Suster’s The Changing Venture Landscape, which shows how VC firms globally are expanding their approach to the market, going well beyond the usual artisanal approach of early-day venture capitalists.

Also, The VC industry is getting a tech upgrade. Despite investing in high-tech industries, venture capital has been a low-tech business, largely built on intros and handshakes. Protocol’s Biz Carson shows how that’s changing, as more firms embrace software and data.

3. Two end-of-the-year classics: the first is Benedict Evans’ big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, Three Steps to the Future: transformative visions for 2025 or 2030; hundreds of start-ups taking ideas from the last decade and deploying them over and over in one industry after another; the old economy trying to keep up and facing waves of disruption. The second is Atomico’s State of European Tech, the deepest and most comprehensive data-driven analysis of the European tech ecosystem.

4. Investors are starting to re-evaluate traditional portfolio approaches and putting impact at the top of their agenda. Sustainable investing is about investing in progress and recognizing that companies solving the world’s biggest challenges can be best positioned to grow. Andrew Winston summarized on the Harvard Business Review how and why Sustainable Business Went Mainstream in 2021.

5. New York Times’ journalist Erin Griffith has been following for months the trial of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos. Among the articles I’ve enjoyed the most: They Still Live in the Shadow of Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, on female entrepreneurs facing a constant comparison to Ms. Holmes; What Red Flags? Elizabeth Holmes Trial Exposes Investors’ Carelessness on the risks of inaccurate due diligence; and the hectic meta-reportage A Day in the Life of a Reporter Covering the Elizabeth Holmes Trial.

5 Books For Winter Reading

1. In un volo di storni, by Giorgio Parisi (ITA). Only those who relentlessly question the world have the answers about what will happen and what is already happening. And in physics as well as in venture capital, "The best work of a lifetime of research can turn up by accident: you meet it on a road taken to go somewhere else." Authored by Prof. Parisi, winner in 2021 of the Nobel Prize in Physics, this book is a journey into the brilliant mind of a physicist who searched for the rules of complex systems, because the simple ones always seemed a little too boring to him.

2. Steve Jobs non abita più qui, by Michele Masneri (ITA). The more diverse and bizarre tales from San Francisco, the Valley, and the surrounding towns, wittily compiled by Masneri during his East Coast travels and stays. A long, eventful, exhilarating confirmation of Frank Lloyd Wright's words, when he claimed that everything on the planet that does not have a sufficiently solid anchorage will sooner or later begin to slide towards California. 

3. The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, by Ainissa Ramirez. Materials scientist Ramirez’s book explores eight stories of how humans and matter transform one another. The stories of clocks, steel rails, copper cables, photographic film, light bulbs, and silicon chips show how these technological and scientific developments have shaped human culture. Everyone can create something, she says, so stories of science need to reflect the fact that innovation is universal. 

4. Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. According to Bill Gates, who included this thought-provoking tale of friendship and robots in his traditional 2021 Christmas reading list, “Robots are going to play a huge role in our future, and fiction is a great way to explore what exactly that might mean”. Ishiguro’s novel about an artificial friend to a sick young girl made him think about what life with super-intelligent robots might look like—and whether we’ll treat these kinds of machines as pieces of technology or as something more.

5. Uncle Tungsten. Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, by Oliver Sacks. This is Sacks' (a distinguished neurologist and bestselling author, perhaps best known for his books Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) inspiring memoir of his childhood and early teenage years in wartime England - a chronicle of his love affair with science, chemistry, and energy. “A crystalline view of a brilliant young mind springing to life, full of the electrifying joy of discovery.”

ICYMI

📈 Southern Europe is a region that has all the characteristics of a major VC area—skilled talent, vibrant cities, large total addressable markets, and strong geographical infrastructure. Although VC in Southern Europe has lagged comparable regions elsewhere in Europe, things are changing. There is still a way to go, but perceptions have shifted and confidence has crystalized. Southern European tech is on a strong trajectory, more attractive, and dynamic than ever. Read more on our blog, where we deep dive into the recently published Pitchbook Analyst Note “VC in Southern Europe”, curated by Nalin Patel and featuring a contribution by Massimiliano Magrini.

🎤 “The world of venture capital takes a long time. It takes time to develop innovation that transforms the world. It takes time for innovations to be identified and implemented on the market. And it takes time to generate that virtuous effect of new investors wanting to reinvest and new entrepreneurs wishing to launch their company. So you simply have to put yourself in that time frame”. In November, the blog ScaleupItaly featured a beautiful interview by Ilaria Cavalleri to Paolo Gesess. They talked about how much the Italian VC industry has changed during his career, from 1997 until today, and what we need to work on to make Italy a prominent market at a European level.

💡 In October, Massimiliano joined the panel "Digital Roads to Sustainability" organized by Traent at the Pisa Internet Festival, one of the most relevant events dedicated to digital transformation. He discussed with a panel of VCs from all around the world how to collect and maximize national and global funds to boost innovation and the tech industry, specifically in the Italian context. You can rewatch the panel at this link (from 5:27:39).

That’s all for today!

Stay tuned and be sure to follow us on Linkedin or Twitter for more updates.

PS. Have you enjoyed this newsletter? We would love to hear your feedback ❤️

Please feel free to share any questions, thoughts, or comments you may have. 

Share United Ventures’ Newsletter

After a busy few months, the summer offers us a much-needed break. In this edition of our newsletter, you’ll find a recap of what we and our portfolio companies have been up to lately, plus a selection of our favorite readings on tech, the investing landscape, and much more (e.g., oppressive algorithms, ancient languages, and mythological figures…).

Wherever you are in the world, we hope you have the opportunity to unplug, reset and enjoy some time away with your friends and family.

Best wishes for a happy summer!

The United Ventures Team

Subscribe now

New investments

Entando

“In the enterprise world that keeps digitalizing, evolving and embracing new technology solutions and architectures, the role of the developer is changing rapidly, getting closer to business and becoming first time accountable for overall operational excellence and time-to-production.”

On August 3rd, we announced the first investment of our recently launched growth fund. We led the $11 million Series B round of Entando, the Cagliari/San Diego-based platform for building enterprise modular web applications on Kubernetes. The funding will drive the continued development of Entando’s community and accelerate its expansion and growth globally, scaling awareness, channel, and operations. To learn how Entando solves the developers’ dilemma to spend less time worrying about deploying containers and more time building applications that can deliver tangible value to the business, read Fabio’s post on our website. 

Young Platform

“This is the story of six friends living and breathing crypto ever since high school, who envisioned a cashless world where people get full control and ownership of their assets.”

As part of our long-term investment thesis aimed at innovating and democratizing financial services through technology, in June we led Young Platform’s €3.5 million Series A – the largest round in the crypto sector in Italy so far. Founded to bring transparency, inclusion, and education to the world of personal finance and digital assets, Young Platform is building the next-generation platform for cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance, while maintaining a community-driven identity and focusing on user-friendly products. Read more on our blog.

Portfolio highlights 

BOOM has a new website, a new visual identity made for a more accessible and intuitive navigation experience, and a new home located in the center of Milan, which includes BOOM’s new office and a studio for scalable content production. 

brumbrum closed a €65 million financing operation with a focus on long-term rentals - a unique operation of its kind in Italy and among the first in Europe. La Repubblica has more here.

Cloud4Wi, now part of Microsoft Azure Marketplace and the HubSpot App Marketplace, has been listed for a fourth time in the 2021 Gartner Market Guide for Indoor Location Application Platforms report.

Credimi celebrated the first two years since the launch of Credimi Futuro, the digital financing born in June 2019 and designed on the needs of Italian SMEs, with 500 million euros lent and 38 thousand requests for financing.

Datrix closed a financing round with Banca Generali and 8a+ Investimenti SGR to support its ambitious growth plan across the group's four operational areas - Marketing & Sales, FinTech, Data Monetization, and Machine Learning models.

Deliveristo has been listed among the startups that are disrupting the world of food service and helping restaurants and bars to overcome this challenging period through innovative solutions.

Equalum was selected as an Emerging Vendor in the big data category for 2021 in CRN's annual report on Emerging Tech Vendors, which looks for companies providing innovative solutions on a growth trajectory and changing the game. 

Exein CEO Gianni Cuozzo told the incredible story of his life to Barbara Carfagna and Massimo Cerofolini on Codice Beta, the Rai podcast on innovation visionaries. Listen to the episode here.

Fiscozen is growing steadily and expanding its team with various Sales, Product, and Tax team positions. Check the openings here.

FACEIT has been nominated for Esports Broadcast/Production Team of the Year in this year’s Esports Awards, dedicated to showcasing top-class performance and innovation within the scene.

InSilicoTrials announced a partnership with pharma giant Takeda and the University of Graz to increase scientific understanding of current and future manufacturing process of biopharmaceuticals.

Loop AI Group has been selected as the winner of the Innovations Award for Cognitive Robotics for 2021 in the prestigious Annual AI Breakthrough Awards.

MainStreaming has signed several important partnerships, the latter of which being with Belgian media hub KevlinX for the provision of ultra-low latency, environmentally sustainable VDN services.

MishiPay claimed the top prize in the 'Hottest eCommerce & Retail Startup' category at The Europas Tech Startup Awards.

Moneyfarm achieved an important milestone in terms of business growth as they reached two billion euros in assets under management, doubling down the first billion, reached at the beginning of 2020, in just 16 months.

Musixmatch announced a suite of next-level tools coming up in Q4 2021 to provide a self-service platform for all music creators and professionals. Discover more about Musixmatch Pro and join the waitlist.

xFarm has been selected among the 28 finalists of the "Digital Excellence in Agriculture in Europe and Central Asia" contest organized by FAO and the International Telecommunication Union. 

News from the Team

We are happy to announce that Paolo Altomare joined the United Ventures investment team!

Paolo joins us as an Investment Manager and will be focusing on growth venture capital investments within UV T-Growth, our latest fund, which targets primarily European companies with proven traction in fast-growing sectors such as 5G, cloud/edge computing, smart cities, AI, SaaS, cybersecurity, digital health & IoT.

Paolo has a background in technology, media and telco M&A in Milan and London at GP Bullhound and GCA Altium, where he worked on mid-market sell-side and buy-side deals across the US, Europe and Japan. Paolo also brings corporate strategy and development experience from his time at Bird, the Sequoia-backed Californian micromobility unicorn, where he joined as employee one in the Italian market, building in just two years a successful €8m revenue business from scratch.

Welcome, Paolo!

A special mention goes to Tommaso Palmieri, who is about to end his summer internship at United Ventures. A student of Mathematics and Computer Engineering at New York University with a passion for writing, photography, and debate, Tommaso supported the team on a special project we are working on. With his heterogeneous skills, he made a huge contribution to our organization. Thank you for your hard work and dedication, Tommaso!

5 Things Worth Sharing

Tech insights from the world, trends, perspectives & more.

1. Failure will (and should) always be a reality for many entrepreneurs. But by recognizing that many failures follow the same trajectory, we can reduce their number and frequency. Aiming for a more productive, more diverse, and less bruising entrepreneurial economy, a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School identified the recurring patterns that explain why startups fail. (Harvard Business Review)

2. The iconic piece “Technology Saves the World” by Marc Andreessen reflects on the fundamental role that technology has played throughout the pandemic, from the story of Moderna, a classic, American biotech startup backed by venture capital with a new technology called mRNA that now we have all come to know to remote working, a ‘permanent civilizational shift’ that made us realize that many jobs can be performed from anywhere, through screens and the internet. (Future by a16z)

3. The essay “Does Tech Need a New Narrative?” by Anna Wiener offers an interesting counterweight to the previous piece. Wiener, a merciless observer of the tech world, who previously authored the memoir novel Uncanny Valley, analyses Andreessen Horowitz’s marketing strategy - which has evolved ‘into something like mythology’ - and how the firm is changing the storytelling game. (The New Yorker)

4. Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffè, Professor of Strategy at SDA Bocconi School of Management and Board Member at United Ventures, reflects on the role of Big Tech in a world where digital is no longer the promised land of technology but a real economic and social necessity, indispensable for recovering lost productivity and solidarity. (Aspenia Online)

5. In a 2013 study, mathematical linguist András Kornai found that of the more than 7,000 languages used around the world — 2,500 of which are considered endangered — less than 5% were becoming fully functioning languages in the online realm. The expansion of the internet, in other words, is precipitating a massive linguistic extinction. Meet the people fighting to bring one of those languages, Urdu, to the future and digitally preserve its ornate, beautiful script. (Rest of World)

5 Books For Summer Reading

1. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, by Safiya Umoja Noble. This book shows how online search engine results are far from neutral, reinforcing racist and sexist beliefs. When the author mentioned that to Google representatives, they said it was the computer’s fault or an anomaly they can’t control, but algorithms are not neutral. They are created by people, and, therefore, they carry biases and prejudices from the people that have written these algorithms (mainly, white men). 

2. Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, by Meredith Broussard. A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume that computers always get it right. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.

3. How To Become A Successful Artist, by Magnus Resch. With advice from the art world’s leading experts, this must-have guide explains the core business principles of being an artist and reveals how to make it in the art market. A fun reading to understand how the art world works with case studies drawn from interviews with leading experts and practitioners, including artists, gallerists, and curators. Because being an artist essentially means being an entrepreneur.

4. The AI-First Company, by Ash Fontana. If you want to win with AI, you need to put it first on your priority list. That means reading and learning everything you can about the development and uses of AI, from core skills to cutting-edge innovations. Ash Fontana’s new playbook, The AI-First Company, is a great place to start: it offers a comprehensive framework for understanding AI and practical advice for developing an ‘AI-First’ mindset that can potentially reshape how we do business.

5. Storie di Startup dalla A alla Z, AA. VV.. Twenty-six stories, one for each letter of the alphabet,  offering practical insights and first-hand experience around the themes of the startup world. A choral book dedicated to the widest audience of startuppers, innovation enthusiasts and professionals, ultimately representing a compass to orient in the rough sea of the startup world. Our Fabio Pirovano authored the chapter “R for Round.”

ICYMI

💰David Swensen, who headed the Investments Office at Yale University from 1985 until his death in May 2021, was one of the greatest investors of our time. We explored his revolutionary intuitions and the concept of Venture Capital as an asset class aimed at long-term value creation. 

🔬Funding research and turning researchers’ work into marketable technological innovations is the essence of a State's science and economic development policy. But what is the best way to translate investment into innovation? Our take on “The Digital Leviathan.”

🎙️Why exactly does design matter for a VC firm and its portfolio companies? Gianluca Cinquepalmi and Bel Barreiros had a beautiful conversation on the role design has in building valuable, sustainable and innovative businesses. Listen here to the podcast.

🗞️ The July issue of MAG featured an in-depth interview by Claudia La Via to Massimiliano Magrini. They talked about Venture Capital, hybrid models for financing innovation, and the virtuous connections the Italian ecosystem needs to grow.

Subscribe now

That’s all for today!

Stay tuned and be sure to follow us on Linkedin or Twitter for more updates.

PS. Have you enjoyed this newsletter? We would love to hear your feedback ❤️

Please feel free to share any questions, thoughts, or comments you may have. 

Q1 2021 has been an all-time record quarter for venture capital investment in European startups, with $21.4 billion raised - close to double over the last quarter of 2020 - and consistent activity seen at every funding stage. As we emerge from the pandemic, tech entrepreneurs are in the midst of a very delicate, yet promising moment. 

Capital is flowing at different levels and massive structural changes are underway in the startup and VC ecosystem. Having built strong foundations in the last decade, we are ready and excited to enter this new phase, right by our founders’ side.

At the same time, we are well aware that these changes require an increased effort towards a more sustainable ecosystem, and we are focusing on how to accelerate sustainability as a strategic objective within our internal operations, portfolio and dealflow.

There is a long way to go, but one thing is certain: to create enduring value and impactful returns, growth must be pursued in a responsible manner. 

Read on for a selection of news, announcements and milestones from around our portfolio and team. You will also find a curated list of good readings we have made lately and a selection of tech insights and reports.

Best wishes,

The United Ventures Team

Portfolio highlights 

BOOM made a few strategic hirings - Ludovico Mastrocinque Garcia (ex LinkedIn and Slack) as COO, Marco Gadaleta (ex Yoox and Facile.it) as Head of Product, and Valentina Bruno (ex Verizon) as Senior Backend Engineer. Furthermore, the Sales team grew with the addition of 6 people, and the signature of 30 new logos. A strong entrance into the US market with three new clients and the opening of BOOM’s US operations. 

brumbrum, on its mission to build the reference consumer retail brand and experience in the automotive category, is keeping a close eye on the changes in the Italian car market online through the data collected by its observatory. The vitality of the long-term rental trend leads to predictions of future automotive scenarios, increasingly marked by agile, smart and digital commercial formulas, capable of responding promptly to new needs with seamless processes and tech.

Cloud4Wi was named a Top 5 Marketing Vendor in the OnCon Icon Awards - voters chose vendors that they felt had a good mix of great products/services, have contributed to the marketing community with thought leadership, and who have been exceptionally innovative. Also, Cloud4Wi recently joined forces with Tanaza, the WiFi cloud management platform, to deliver an enterprise-grade guest WiFi solution with unprecedented hardware flexibility.

Credimi launched two new financing products - Credimi Subito and Credimi Commerce - to further support the growth of small and very small Italian companies, making access to credit easier and faster. The team is growing at a fast pace with the entrance of 16 new professionals since November; among them Valentina Cabianca and Giacomo Ghersi, joining Credimi’s leadership team as Chief People Officer and Chief Risk Officer respectively.

Datrix has concluded two medium-long term financing lines with UBI Banca and Banco BPM, thus completing the capital raise started in 2020 with the equity round led by United Ventures.

FinScience comparatively analyzed, for Il Sole 24 Ore, Twitter and the Wallstreetbets subreddit, to identify the most important financial influencers and the correlations between social media discussions and financial volumes. Full report here.

3rdPlace is focusing on the collection, analysis and activation of first-party data, which has become critical in light of the cookie-less revolution underway. They have a series of webinars underway with Fieg (Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers) and recently they organized an online breakfast with slides that can be downloaded here. 

Deliveristo is building a digital market where restaurateurs can find everything they need and order in the simplest and fastest possible way. In this interview with Ilaria Cavalleri on ScaleupItaly, the co-founder and CEO Ivan Aimo explains the company’s business model, the results achieved so far, and the future developments. Besides being selected by EU-Startups among the 10 most promising Italian startups to watch out for in 2021, Deliveristo has been featured among Forward Fooding’s FoodTech 500 and in the AgFunder 2021 Global AgriFoodTech Report.

Equalum was selected as one of the Top 10 Change Data Capture Tools to consider in 2021 by Solutions Review, as it offers an enterprise-class data ingestion platform for collecting, transforming, manipulating, and synchronizing data with an intuitive, user-friendly interface that enables users to build and deploy data pipelines via a no-coding approach. 

Fiscozen and Exein (with its product Exein Core reaching 20.000 users in just 3 months since the launch of its beta program) have gained access to Elevator, Endeavor Italy's program for high-potential future entrepreneurs. The program has a duration of 6 months and its purpose is to help entrepreneurs to grow their companies and activate international contacts, to eventually undertake the selection process of Endeavor globally. 

FACEIT just launched a new free platform for TF2 where players, content creators, tournament organizers and communities will engage with new and rewarding play experiences, innovative community tools, and a closer social network. Interested in how data integrates with gaming and esports business strategy? Listen to FACEIT's co-founder and Chief Business Officer Michele Attisani and Tiffany Monahan chatting all things gaming economy on the Grow by SAP podcast.

InSilicoTrials recently won 3 projects (SimCardioTest, Brainteaser, In SilicoWorld) out of 9 submitted to Horizon 2020, EU’s most important funding program for research and innovation: an amazing result since usually the acceptance rate is 5%. To learn more about how to accelerate the uptake of simulation in healthcare you can read the interviews of Startup.info and Digital Health Buzz! to the founder Luca Emili, while to stay updated on all the news you can check out InSilicoTrials’ great blog here. 

Loop AI Group is organizing the 2nd edition of Loop Q PRIZE student contest, an AI/ML/ Data Science competition for university students across Europe. The deadline is April 25th, and the registration form along with all further information is on www.loopqprize.ai. Loop AI has been shortlisted among hundreds of entries as a Finalist in the Banking Tech of the Year 2021 Award: here is a link to register and stream the event on April 27th.

MainStreaming has grown and strengthened the team with new members, all working towards new AI-powered technologies to deliver video content more intelligently. Among them is former Vevo CEO Erik Huggers, who formally joined the company as Advisor to provide strategic guidance to advance Mainstreaming business growth to the next level. To learn more about online video delivery, watch and read these interviews (by IABM and Startup.info) with CEO and founder Antonio Corrado.

MishiPay announced in March launches with Flying Tiger Copenhagen and Paradies Lagardère. The partnership with Flying Tiger now extends across 30 stores in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, enabling shoppers to use their own phones to shop; while Paradies Lagardère has become the first concessionaire to introduce MishiPay’s innovative solution in the U.S. airport market. If you want to learn more on the Scan, Pay & Go technology, take a look at Mishipay’s latest case study, detailing the recent deployment with leading Japanese homewares retailer MUJI in their UK stores. 

Moneyfarm turned 10 years old! 🎂In this video message featured on La7’s Madeinitaly Paolo Galvani, president and co-founder, shares the convictions guiding Moneyfarm’s growth over the years: the fact that is possible to work differently in the world of finance, offering simple, transparent, and low-cost investment solutions; and that technology can make available on large scale opportunities that for a long time have always been reserved for a few investors. If you missed Moneyfarm’s annual Investment Outlook event for 2021, you can watch it on YouTube [IT-EN] or get your own copy of the Strategic Asset Allocation document for this year [IT-EN].

Musixmatch had one great start of the year with +15 new professionals who have joined the crew, on a mission to enhance the experience of listening to music. But the quest for talent is ongoing - check their open positions at the bottom of this newsletter. In the meanwhile take a look at this super interesting article aimed at understanding the positioning of women in music through AI technology and lyrics-based music metadata.

xFarm has exceeded 500k hectares registered on the app and is on its way to reach 50k users! The adoption of xFarm-branded agricultural technology is ever-growing, as more and more farmers decide to digitize their activity. For them, and for all those interested in learning more about digital farming, xFarm has been producing a lot of great content: check out this interview by Talent Garden on the latest agtech trends (spoiler: Predictive Analytics, Automation e Supply Chain) and their series xFarmers Stories.

News from the Team

Talking Growth with United Ventures

“We are approaching a perfect storm where 5G is poised to be a real driver for innovation. Because it will enable a variety of applications for the Enterprise and within Industry 4.0 thanks to key features like Ultra-low latency, which will enable IoT applications that were not possible before. There are thousands of players in hundreds of industries that can and will benefit from modernizing and digitizing their production, maintenance, and distribution systems through secure private networks. Which will in turn drive the enhancement and development of parallel sectors like Cloud & Edge Computing as well as AI/ML. Never before in connectivity has there been such awareness or coordinated effort across different verticals and stakeholders to deliver and capture value.” 

As our new fund UV T-Growth starts operations, we asked our growth partners Damiano and Fabio a few questions about Italy and Europe’s tech ecosystem, the peculiarities of late-stage investing, and where they see innovation coming from. Read the full interview.

Introducing Michael Harte

“Choose people well. Inspiration, ideas, passion and hard work are all valuable human traits. These are the characteristics we look for to identify intrinsic value(s) and where to invest. Ultimately large doses of these traits can be the differentiators of success. It’s easy to get seduced by the latest and greatest gadgets or technological breakthroughs from algorithms in AI to new compounds in life science – however, if it’s not supported by driven people willing to go the extra mile with passion and hard work, it’s unlikely to succeed.”

At United Ventures, we always try to find teammates who share our vision, but also expand our thinking and perspective. Michael Harte, who joined UV in January to lead Research, is no exception. Michael possesses a unique technology vision and a deep understanding of how to drive growth through digital strategies, having spent a significant part of his professional life creating value through innovation, leading change, transformation and growth across the banking and the broader financial services industry. Read the full interview to get to know him better.

Things Worth Sharing

Tech insights from the world, trends, perspectives & more.

1. Every year, Benedict Evans produces a big presentation digging into macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year it is called “The Great Unbundling” and includes a view to the next 50 years, too. Not to be missed.

2. The list “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2021” marks 20 years since the MIT Technology Review began compiling an annual selection of the year’s most important technologies. Some, such as mRNA vaccines, are already changing our lives, while others are still a few years off.

3. “How Venture Capitalists Make Decisions" is an insightful article published on the Harvard Business Review summarizing what is perhaps the most comprehensive survey of US VC firms to date. Through plenty of data, the authors offer details on how VCs hunt for deals, assess and winnow down opportunities, add value to portfolio companies, structure agreements with founders, and operate their own firms. 

4. Venture capital firms play a critical role in shaping the future of technology, industry and society; yet VC has lagged behind other asset classes with regard to ESG. The groundbreaking report “Responsible Investing in Tech and Venture Capital” reviews a range of dilemmas that the venture capital industry faces in managing ESG considerations and proposes potential solutions that the industry could adopt.

5. If you haven’t had enough of non-fungible tokens, the go-to resource is the NFT Canon by a16z: a curated list of readings on all things NFTs, organized from the big picture of what NFTs (with regard to art, music, gaming, social tokens...) are and why they matter, to how to mint, collect, and do more with them.

6. The big deal of the past weeks was the direct listing of crypto exchange Coinbase, which entered public markets trading at $381 per share, giving the company a market cap of $99 billion. The crypto company just crushed the first three months of 2021 and it’s worth putting its monster Q1 in context. One thing is certain - the crypto industry is establishing itself and this is only the beginning...

7. Be sure to check the 2021 AI Index Report, presenting extremely rich data across a huge range of topics, including technical progress, AI education, the economy, and more. AI investment in drug design and discovery received the greatest amount of private AI investment in 2020, with more than $13.8 billion, 4.5 times higher than 2019.

8. According to a new cybersecurity report by Crunchbase, the first quarter of this year saw more than $3.7 billion invested globally into the industry — outpacing the $2.3 billion for the first quarter last year. If this level of investment continues, the cybersecurity industry would shatter last year’s record of $7.8 billion invested globally and see the sector hit nearly $15 billion in total venture investment.

9. A new generation of companies around the world is challenging the status quo – and changing the startup playbook along the way. From China’s internet giants to startups in Nigeria to policy debates in the EU, this beautiful collective report “Beyond Silicon Valley” by Quartz tries to find out where the next big battles in tech are happening.

10. “Scientists have taught spinach to send emails” wins the prize for the weirdest news of the quarter. As unbelievable as it sounds, engineers at MIT have developed nanotechnology which can be embedded in plants.

ICYMI

🏆 Our portfolio companies InSilicoTrials, BOOM, MainStreaming, and MishiPay made the longlist at The Europas Tech Startup Awards! Before the judges make their decisions, you can vote at this link and help them make the shortlist.

🖋️ In the last months, it became evident that a robust technological-digital infrastructure is a substantial and necessary element of the functioning of society.  But what are the trends that will characterize technological development in the post-pandemic society? Find it out in our blog post. [IT]

🎙️ Andrea Picardi, director of communication at I-Com, Institute for Competitiveness, hosted Massimiliano in his podcast Hello Innovation to talk about the innovation ecosystem in Italy between development prospects and problems to be addressed. [IT]

📝 In this interview with Andrea Pietrini, chairman of YourGroup, Paolo traces the history of United Ventures and analyzes what has changed since he has started his career as a VC. [IT]

👩‍💻 As members of the VCs for Female Founders initiative, we will join the next event on April 30th focusing on sustainability, where our Sara together with more than 70 investors from Europe offer virtual office hours to give advice and guidance to female founders and mixed founding teams from DACH. 

📱 In March, Damiano was invited to speak at 5PRING event about 5G applications in enterprise, industry trends, and the key enablers to VC investment in the space.

✏️ Bel discussed the universe at the intersection of business design, technology & venture capital with the local chapter for IxDA Milan and Turin in a lively Clubhouse session.

💬 Mario joined Cloud4Wi’s Chief Business Evangelist Mario Aprile Zanetti in an online conversation between San Francisco and Cagliari about how to resist the virus of homologation in the time of social (media) distancing.

🥇 Sifted asked P101, 360 Capital and United Ventures about the most promising Italian startups not on our portfolios. Here’s the full list of the 28 Italian startups to watch.

💡 Moze, our design and development partner, published on their website the story of the creative process behind our recent rebrand. 

Portfolio jobs

Our portfolio companies are constantly hiring exceptional talent from all over the world and with work flexibility becoming the norm (e.g., Moneyfarm and BOOM will permanently offer their employees freedom to have options and choose between office life or remote working), most opportunities are open to candidates wherever their location. Check out some of the current openings at the links below:

BOOM | Senior Frontend Engineer, Data Analyst, Account Executive Europe & USA

brumbrum | several positions in Sales, Tech, Production and more

Cloud4Wi | Product Marketing Manager, NYC; Enterprise Sales Director, Milan; Enterprise Sales Director, NYC; Presales Specialist, NYC

Credimi | several positions in Tech, Sales, Marketing, Finance

Datrix | several positions in Data Science, Tech, Marketing, Sales

Equalum | several tech positions between Tel Aviv and San Francisco

FACEIT | several positions in Tech, Design, Marketing and more

Fiscozen | positions in Sales, Product and Tax

InSilicoTrials | Senior Full-Stack Engineer and Frontend Developer

MishiPay | International Partnerships Manager / Channel Account Manager; Engineering Manager / Software Development Manager and more

Moneyfarm | Digital Marketing, Investment Consultant, SEO & CRO Specialist

Musixmatch | several positions in Engineering, Business Development, Finance, Publishing Operations and more

That’s all for today!

Stay tuned and be sure to follow us on Linkedin or Twitter for more updates.

PS. Have you enjoyed this newsletter? We would love to hear your feedback ❤️

Please feel free to share any questions, thoughts, or comments you may have.

Leave a comment