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While funding for Italian startups has been growing, the country still ranks eighth in Europe for venture capital investment. Trading Room.
New Founders Fund Italy (IFF) hopes to help catch up in terms of both quantity and quality. It has invested €50 million in 25 companies and positions itself as an industry-neutral, founder-friendly fund that understands the pain points of entrepreneurs.
IFF already has four companies in its portfolio, with a fifth deal in the works. Two deals have been disclosed so far: Customer research platform Glaut In April this year, IFF led the 2023 round of financing Human Resources Technology Startup Jet HR.
“IFF is helping early-stage Italian entrepreneurs find lead investors with strong conviction at the pre-seed and seed stages,” IFF founding partner Lorenzo Franzi (pictured above, third from right) told TechCrunch.
Some may disagree with this diagnosis; venture capital firms operating in Italy already include CDP Venture Capital, Axel Ventures, LVenture Group, Milan Investment Partners, Parritt Partners, First Venture Capitaland Joint Ventures.
However, Franzi believes this still leaves a gap for early-stage capital. Regardless, IFF will be a new source of capital for a market where the total funding for startups in the country is much lower than in France, despite the two countries having similar population sizes.
IFF also complements the following accelerators: Korean Farmwhich is a step up from the angel investments that Francis and other entrepreneurs have turned to.
Former CEO Laundrapp Become a Partner Global Founders Capital Until the end of 2022, he said the inherently “unstructured” approach of angel investing can lead to problems such as limited analysis, complex capital tables and insufficient funding rounds. IFF can bring the structure of the fund into its investment process but can also get involved personally after the investment.
For example, Franzi said IFF is able to help portfolio companies with key hires, commercial expansion and strategic partnerships. Marco Ogliengo, CEO of Jet HR, agreed, noting that IFF’s value-add comes from “supporting basically every successful Italian founder.”
That may be an exaggeration, but according to Franzi, 100 of IFF’s supporters are Italian entrepreneurs, adding that they come from different age groups and walks of life, but have a common goal: to make Italy one of the best places in Europe to start a company.
It’s an ambitious goal, not least because some of the pain points are beyond the IFF’s remit: private venture capital firms have little ability to balance High taxes and cumbersome paperworkThe government has been working hard to boost the country’s attractiveness and tech sector recently; however, unlike CDP Capital, Supported by national institutionsIFF is entirely privately funded.
In the absence of public funding or institutional LPs, IFF is free to invest where it sees fit. It will use this geographic flexibility to support Italian founders operating abroad as well as foreign startups interested in entering the Italian market.
The foreign connections go both ways, with IFF aiming to get foreign VC funds to co-invest in its portfolio, both as initial and follow-on investments. It also helps that some of its LPs are GPs of foreign funds and it plans to back Italian founders with global ambitions.
Italian global startups include Bending SpoonThe company owns popular apps and services like Evernote and Meetup. Value: $2.55 billion. and Italian serial entrepreneur go home To start their next business, it seems appropriate to have a founder-led fund to support them now.
IFF will be Koinos CapitalMarco Morgese, CEO of , a private equity fund that is expanding into venture capital, cited examples of founder-led funds in other markets, such as Founders Fund In the United States, or more recently, Galien.exe In France.
Seeing IFF adopt this model in Italy is another sign of a maturing ecosystem. On the venture capital side, numbers are improving, but there is still more work to do. “In Italy, it is critical to challenge the status quo of process, speed and an entrepreneur-centric mindset,” said Franzi.
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