Go to the profile of Arcangelo Rociola
Arcangelo Rociola
Journalist, managing editor at @startup_italia. Tweet about #startup and digital economy. Working on @Euvalley — When in trouble, consult i-Ching

All the investments in Italian startups in January, in a timeline

In January 2015 there were no venture operations in Italy. One year later the Italian ecosystem registered 4 operations, and we can add one if we consider the startups forced to move abroad in the last years. As StartupItalia.eu we put all this operation in one timeline as we usually do year after year to represent how the Italian ecosystem is evolving. as time is the best way to explain things changing.

The method used is based on deal, round, exit and whatever startups have communicated during January. We usually exclude preseed and seed round (considering the undercapitalized dimension of Italian ecosystem, we consider a seed from 50K to 200K Euro), just because it’s impossible to monitorate avery single seed out there.

Overall, we registered 22,2 million invested in 5 startup. But most of this money went to aLondon based startups, which is founded and run by an Italian team moved to Uk in 2012.

That means the venture operations on Italy based startups were about 7.2M in 4 operations.

This is what we registered, startup by startup.

  1. Ultroneo, fintech, it’s a software to release invoices via POS. The team closed 390K in a round A investment led byItalian Angels for Growth and Aldabra Capital buying 20,7% of the shares.
  2. Smartika, fintech, closed a 4,5M funding round led by London based Hamilton Ventures.
  3. Horus Technology, a crossbreed startup that mixes robotic, health care and augmented reality for sightless people, closed a 900K round investment led by Us Lion Holdings.
  4. D-Eye, biotech, startup that patented a optical device for smartphone to make medical examinations via mobile closed a 3,5million round A investment with a bunch of Institutional investors and Invitalia Ventures. Invitalia Ventures could be one of the most interesting new venture firms in Italy. Subsidiary of Italian minister of Economy, it was launched on June 2014 with a 50M fund created in order to co-invest with other venture firms to support them in their operations. IV planned to invest in 100 Italian startup in 2016. Other Invitalia Venture funds have been announced during this year.
  5. FaceIt, London based startup run by Italian team closed a 15M round C investment led by Italian fund United Ventures, Anthos Capital andIndex Ventures. The team created an innovative software to play online with a lot of other players.