We are founders.
roots and global ambitions.
There from
the beginning
We invest from Pre-Seed to Series A in companies with an Italian DNA: born in Italy, expanding here, or founded by Italians anywhere in the world. We lead or co-lead early rounds, and help unlock global capital when it’s time to scale.
We’ve been founders before: we know speed matters and what it takes to build. After years of international experience, we came back to Italy to build the VC we wish we had when we started. With a unique network of Italians' top builders and entrepreneurs, we are the country’s first founder-backed VC.
We are Italy’s first founder-backed VC — the partner the country’s best entrepreneurs want and deserve.
We’re looking for:
- Unlimited ambition and global mindset
- Exceptional and passionate founders
- Extreme transparency
- No fear to fail and iterate
We’re offering:
- €250k to €3m initial investment
- Active support from our operating team and founders community
- Founder friendly terms and conditions (we have been on the other side!)
- Speed and transparency
Do you want to share your business idea with us?
Explore POrtfolio
Jet HR
Jet HR is building a modern payroll and HR platform for Italian SMBs, under-digitized market estimated at ~€2.8bn in Italy alone. The company was founded by Marco Ogliengo, second-time founder and former CEO of ProntoPro, which he scaled into a leading European marketplace before its acquisition by Immobiliare.it, together with Francesco Scalambrino, former VP Product at ProntoPro and later Product Director at PayFit and Oyster, where he led payroll products in highly regulated environments. Jet HR starts from payroll and automates the most complex operational and compliance-heavy workflows faced by Italian companies. The product is designed as a modular system that expands into adjacent HR and back-office use cases, becoming the core infrastructure layer for growing teams.
Glaut
Glaut is an AI native customer research platform that helps companies gather, analyze and act on customer feedback at scale. The company was founded by Matteo Cera, former Senior Venture Partner at Pioneer Fund and Engagement Manager at McKinsey, together with Giovanni Del Gallo, a technical founder from the Vento Founder Cohort 2022 with strong experience in AI systems. Glaut automates the analysis of open ended survey responses, a traditionally manual and expensive process, enabling companies to extract structured insights from qualitative feedback faster and at lower cost. The company operates in the large and well-established customer research market, where proven players have built multi-billion-dollar businesses, demonstrating the scale and attractiveness of the category.
Skillvue
Skillvue is an AI-powered skill assessment platform that helps companies evaluate candidates and employees across soft skills, culture fit and leadership potential at scale. The company was founded by Nicolò Mazzocchi and Simone Patera, who previously worked together at Booming Lab, bringing a combination of entrepreneurial, commercial and product experience. Skillvue addresses a large and structurally inefficient assessment market where traditional hiring and evaluation methods are often costly, biased and poorly predictive. The platform uses AI to make skill assessment more scalable and data-driven, helping companies improve hiring, internal mobility and workforce development. The company operates within the broader HR tech and talent assessment space, where early enterprise traction has already validated demand for a more modern and effective approach to workforce evaluation.
Salupay
Salupay is a revenue collection platform built for healthcare clinics, designed to streamline payments and administrative workflows in a sector that remains largely fragmented and operationally inefficient. The company was founded by Giorgia Caruso, former M&A analyst at J.P. Morgan in New York and private equity investor at Blackstone in London, together with Marco Sampellegrini, a senior software engineer with experience at Prima and Facile.it. Salupay helps clinics automate revenue collection and payment processes, reducing administrative burden and improving financial visibility for healthcare providers. The platform combines B2B SaaS with transactional revenue and operates within the large Italian healthcare market, where total spending exceeds €170B annually and private healthcare accounts for a rapidly growing share of out-of-pocket payments
Complaion
Compri is an AI-powered procurement operating system built for mid-market manufacturing companies, addressing a structurally under-digitized function that manages over 70% of industrial spend. Founded in 2024 within Italian Founders Fund’s EiR program by Edoardo Arbizzi (ex-Bain & Company, Ferrari, with firsthand exposure to manufacturing value chains) and Edoardo Gava (ex-Smartpricing, with a background spanning product, finance, and operations), the company targets a €6–8bn European SaaS opportunity, starting from Italy’s €1.2T manufacturing sector. Compri unifies supplier data, spend, and compliance into a single AI-native platform, embedding autonomous agents directly into existing ERP systems. The product automates day-to-day procurement workflows and enables real-time visibility and control across the entire source-to-pay lifecycle for industrial teams.
Compri
ComplAion is an AI-first compliance platform designed to help SMBs achieve, maintain and leverage regulatory certifications. The company was founded by Edoardo Tarricone, former McKinsey consultant with experience in strategy and business development, together with Marco Cortinovis, previously founder of Daily which scaled to over 100,000 users and built a team of more than 50 people, and Alessandro Vaccaniro, an experienced CTO with over 14 years building and scaling software products. ComplAion addresses the highly fragmented compliance and certification market, where companies still rely heavily on consultants to manage complex regulatory requirements. In Italy alone there are over 400,000 certified companies and the country represents the second-largest ISO certification market globally, valued at more than €0.8B. The platform uses AI to automate documentation, monitoring and certification management workflows, enabling companies to handle compliance processes more efficiently while reducing reliance on manual consulting services.
Sava
Sava is developing next-generation biosensing technology designed to access continuous biological signals in a painless, real-time and affordable way. The company was founded by Renato Circi and Rafael Michali, bioengineering graduates from Imperial College London who previously built Caura together before launching Sava in 2019. Sava operates in the rapidly expanding wearable biosensor and continuous glucose monitoring market, that is projected to reach $20B by 2028. The company’s technology aims to significantly improve how physiological data is collected and monitored, enabling more accessible and scalable health monitoring solutions for patients and healthcare systems.
Aquila
Aquila is building a data infrastructure platform that connects IoT sensors and Industry 4.0 technologies with sustainable finance and ESG reporting. The company was founded by Stefano Pellegrino, who spent over a decade working in green project finance across Southeast Asia, including roles as Country Head of Vietnam and Head of International Expansion at Aspire, together with Jarek Tkaczyk, a senior engineering leader with more than ten years of experience in software and product development. Aquila operates at the intersection of IoT data and sustainable finance, a rapidly growing market driven by increasing ESG disclosure requirements and rising corporate demand for reliable environmental data. By enabling real-time monitoring and standardized reporting of sustainability metrics, Aquila aims to help companies and financial institutions access higher-quality data to support ESG compliance, transparency and financing decisions.
Peekz
Peekz is an AI-powered social platform designed to modernize the hiring process by connecting professionals through more dynamic and personalized career profiles. The company was founded by Andrea Mach di Palmstein, former first growth hire at BeReal where he helped scale the platform from early traction to over 25 million daily active users and more than 120 million downloads, together with Alex Culebras, an engineer with a background spanning aerospace engineering, investment banking and consumer app development. Peekz addresses the evolving expectations of younger professionals who increasingly seek more authentic and interactive networking experiences than those offered by traditional platforms. The company operates in the large professional networking market, valued at over $50B and projected to grow significantly over the next decade, by introducing AI-driven profiles and career tools designed to make professional discovery and hiring more engaging and personalized.
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Cassandra
Cassandra is building an AI-driven budget allocation platform designed to optimize advertising spend and maximize marketing ROI. The company was founded by Gabriele Franco, a growth and marketing expert who previously founded Hybrida Marketing working with clients such as Conad, Stanford and NATO, together with Cristian Nozzi, a full-stack engineer who built AI and software solutions for over 20 clients and previously worked with companies including Intersemissi Italia and Altravia Servizi. Cassandra operates in the rapidly evolving marketing analytics space, where stricter privacy regulations and the decline of third-party cookies are pushing companies to adopt more advanced, AI-driven measurement and allocation tools. The platform helps businesses optimize marketing budgets across channels by leveraging machine learning models that improve decision-making and campaign performance in an increasingly complex digital advertising landscape.
Brum
Digital driver’s license solution for faster, efficient, and safer licensing.
Excellence Learning
Excellence Learning is an AI-powered tutoring platform focused on education for university students. The company was founded by Mattia Mauro, an École Polytechnique student with a strong interest in physics and aerospace, together with Marc Lundwall, an engineer with experience in cloud computing and software development, and Alexis Bonnafont, a Stanford and École Polytechnique graduate and winner of the International Physics Olympiad. Excellence Learning combines multimodal AI with human coaching to deliver personalized tutoring experiences designed to improve student engagement and learning outcomes. The company operates in the large and growing global tutoring market, which exceeds $100B and is rapidly evolving as AI enables more scalable and personalized education models.
TaDa
TaDa is developing a software platform based on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) technology to improve how households monitor and manage energy consumption. The company was founded by Stefano Fumi, who previously held leadership roles at Enel and has deep experience in the energy sector, together with Giuseppe Teatino, former Head of User Experience and Product Design at PostePay with a background in building consumer-facing digital products. TaDa with its unique combination of a NILM-based approach and its B2B2C model, offers precise, continuous data insights to its partners and end users enabling households and energy partners to monitor energy usage. The company operates within the growing home energy management market, where rising energy costs and increased focus on efficiency are driving demand for smarter, data-driven energy solutions.
ReportAId
ReportAid is an AI-driven platform designed to transform medical reports and unstructured clinical data into actionable insights for healthcare providers. The company was founded by Giuseppe Faraci, former Head of Innovation at Sant’Agostino and Affidea and founder of Run2AI, together with Claudio Caletti, a seasoned technologist with deep expertise in semantic web technologies and more than a decade of experience building healthcare software, and Luca Foresti, CEO of Santagostino and a leading figure in European digital health. ReportAid addresses the growing need for better management and interpretation of clinical documentation as healthcare systems generate increasing volumes of unstructured medical data. ReportAid operates in the European digital health market that is valued at €13.5B, with a €900M serviceable opportunity in Italy among mid-to-large healthcare providers.
CommerceClarity
CommerceClarity is building an AI-native orchestration layer for e-commerce operations, designed to help retailers manage and optimize product catalogs at scale. The company was founded by Federico Sargenti, former early Amazon team member in Italy and co-founder and CEO of Everli, which he helped scale from €1M to €150M in GMV, together with Daniele Vella, a serial entrepreneur with more than 15 years of experience in e-commerce and marketplaces, and Michele Sampieri, an engineer with a background in infrastructure and automation. CommerceClarity develops modular AI agents that create, enrich and optimize product listings across channels, helping retailers automate catalog management and improve discoverability and conversion. The company operates within the large and growing catalog management and e-commerce operations market, where retailers increasingly rely on automation and AI to manage large product assortments and compete across multiple digital marketplaces.
MCP-Use
Manufact is building open-source developer tools and cloud infrastructure to deploy AI agents using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), targeting the emerging agent orchestration layer within a $12B enterprise AI DevOps and automation market. The company was founded in 2025 by Pietro Zullo, second-time founder and ETH Zurich–trained robotics engineer who previously built real-time simulation software for e-commerce and public institutions, and Luigi Pederzani, former founding engineer at Morgen (ETH spin-off) and ex-lead on large-scale AI delivery projects at Accenture Switzerland. MCP-Use addresses the gap between local agent prototyping and production deployment by providing an open-source SDK and a managed runtime for access control, observability, and multi-agent orchestration. The platform is designed for teams deploying agents across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments, with early adoption from enterprise engineering teams experimenting with agent-based workflows.
Platonic Research
Platonic Research is an AI infrastructure company developing Large Concept Models (LCMs), a new class of models designed to outperform traditional LLMs in efficiency, context length and reasoning capabilities. The company was founded by Marco Eterno, a physicist and machine learning researcher from Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa who previously led the Octopus AI research collaboration, together with Federico Visintini, former CTO at Olivia where he built machine learning systems powering revenue-generating products. Platonic Research focuses on the foundational layer of the AI stack, targeting developer tooling and agent infrastructure where model efficiency and reasoning capabilities are critical. By advancing model architecture rather than building applications on top of existing models, the company aims to enable the next generation of AI systems and developer platforms in the broader generative AI market, expected to reach $1.3T by 2032.
Seltz.AI
Seltz AI is building the foundational infrastructure that enables AI agents to ground their reasoning in real-time, multimodal and verifiable web knowledge. The company was founded by Antonio Mallia, a retrieval systems expert who previously worked at Pinecone, Amazon Alexa search and Bloomberg. Seltz develops a structured web index and knowledge layer designed specifically for LLMs and AI agents, enabling them to retrieve, parse and reason over dynamic web data with greater accuracy and reliability. The company is tackling the rapidly expanding $50B+AI infrastructure market, where the growing adoption of autonomous agents is creating demand for more robust data retrieval and grounding systems. Seltz powers LLMs and agents with real-time, query-ready knowledge across coding, research, business, and automation.
Klearly
Klearly is building a software-only payments platform designed for restaurants, enabling merchants to accept card payments directly on smartphones while integrating with existing POS systems. The company was founded by Sam Koekoek, a fintech operator with experience at Unipass and across European and Israeli fintech ecosystems, together with Maya Carmeli, who previously scaled a fintech company to IPO and co-founded Unipass. Klearly distributes its solution through POS partners and generates revenue through a take-rate on transactions, offering restaurants a flexible payments layer that can expand into additional services such as loyalty, customer engagement and financial tools. The company operates in the large European hospitality payments market, that processes €880B annually and where many merchants still rely on fragmented and hardware-heavy payment solutions.
Mama Health
Mama Health is a patient intelligence platform that captures and structures longitudinal patient voice, converting fragmented qualitative data into structured, reusable datasets for pharma companies. By aggregating patient experiences across channels and over time, the platform enables commercial and medical teams to better understand disease journeys, unmet needs and treatment behaviors, replacing traditional static research with continuous, real-time insights. The company was founded by Mattia Marco Caruson, who brings over 10 years of experience in pharma strategy and rare disease launches (ex-Kearney, Johnson & Johnson), together with Jonas Witt, a medical doctor with a neuroscience PhD and a strong product-building track record. Mama Health operates in the global patient insights and market research space, a multi-billion market historically dominated by slow, one-off studies, and is positioned to shift the industry toward scalable, data-driven and patient-centric intelligence.
Discover our Venture Founders, Entrepreneurs, and Professionals
Unlocking Italy’s next GREAT founders
Italian Founders Fund is managed by Koinos Capital SGR, an investment company built by entrepreneurs as well as industry and tech leaders. Our aim is to transform businesses into international platforms.
We know that building a global winner is a challenge, and believe that our know-how can boost focus and passion in order to drive business transformation and growth.
