Silicon Valley Italian Hub is born
Press Release
WHO
Lombardstreet Ventures is a Silicon Valley venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, founded in 2016 by Luigi Bajetti and Massimo Sgrelli. It makes investments in the pre-seed and seed phase, offers office hours to the founders of startups and consultancy and education programs for Italian startups, hubs, and investors. It currently has a portfolio of 25 companies and analyzes more than 500 startups every year.
BootUp is a global ecosystem based in Silicon Valley with many years of experience and well known that has been involved with over 120 companies who have raised more than 400 million in investment and have a combined valuation of over 4 billion. Bootup runs programs to help scale people, startups, and innovate corporates.
SILICON VALLEY ITALIAN HUB IS HERE!
From their experience, the first Silicon Valley Italian Hub was born today, to connect the top Italian strategic assets with Silicon Valley. “We believe that the Italian ecosystem needed its innovation hub in Silicon Valley … so we built it!” says Luigi Bajetti, managing partner of Lombardstreet Ventures, and who is also the hub manager.
Startups, companies, investors, and universities will be able to take advantage of spaces to network, participate in bootcamps and acceleration programs. All within a new and modern space of about 11,000 square feet located in Menlo Park, in the heart of Silicon Valley, near the Facebook offices and Stanford University and surrounded by many other leading technology startups.
HOW WE MADE IT POSSIBLE
“We have promoted consultancy and training programs in Italy to help key people in our ecosystem understand better the logic of Silicon Valley and make them their own,” says Massimo Sgrelli, managing partner of LombardStreet Ventures. “We believe that education and discussion in our country help to lay solid foundations for the opening of the hub in California.”
To close the circle, we joined our efforts with BootUp World, an important and historic global innovation ecosystem in Silicon Valley, founded by Mukul Agarwal, who, for years, has been a primary and renowned player in the area.
“Together with BootUp,” Luigi Bajetti tells us, “starting with Italy as the first element, we decided to create a place born to connect foreign ecosystems to Silicon Valley. Other ecosystems after Italy are planting a seed: Japan, Korea, Spain, China, India, Argentina. All with the spirit and culture typical of Silicon Valley, which aims to merge races and cultures in a single place to create a melting pot of innovation”.
THE VISION
The vision of the future is to have a global ecosystem, where the various nations will open their hub, connecting key players and fueling and promoting collaboration and synergies on a global level.
PARTNERSHIP
We are forging partnerships and synergies with many key players in Italian innovation. The first already started is with Polihub, business accelerator of the Politecnico di Milano University, awarded as one of the “world top 5 university business incubator worldwide”.
We also signed the collaboration with ART-ER which has been present in Silicon Valley since 2015 with the Innovation Hub of Emilia-Romagna and carries out activities for startups, corporate and other stakeholders in its territory.
HOW TO BE PART OF IT
Despite the ongoing pandemic, innovation does not stop, and therefore the first bootcamps are already active and can be followed remotely. In addition, the first 10-week intensive acceleration course at the hub is already underway, which will start as soon as travel can resume.
All details and methods for joining the various initiatives and services of the hub will be published shortly on the website https://svithub.com
For those who need more details on the initiative or information on partnerships, you can write directly to the manager of the hub Luigi Bajetti at the following address: l@lombardstreet.io
