The Week in Italian Startup

The Week in Italian Startup discusses and analyzes the latest news from the Italian startup ecosystem. Giacomo Mollo is a former academic in philosophy turned tech investor. He is co-founder and partner of iN3 Ventures, a corporate innovation and VC firm. Niccolò Sanarico is an Oxford MBA and a software engineer with a passion for innovation and startups. He is currently an Investment Manager at Primo Ventures SGR, a venture capital firm based in Italy.

The Week in Italian Startup is a business podcast hosted by Giacomo Mollo, with 211 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Giacomo Mollo hosts The Week in Italian Startup, a business show with 211 episodes published.

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  The Week in Italian Startup

  Fewer startups, bigger cheques - H1 2026 in Italian Venture Capital #210

  Jul 28, 202616 min

  Italian startup funding in H1 2026 came in at €679M according to VeM and €813M according to Growth Capital — two official venture capital reports on the same six months, €134M apart, and both correct. Giacomo Mollo and Niccolò Sanarico break down why the two observatories count differently: VeM tracks institutional, tech-transfer-heavy activity in Italian-incorporated companies and classifies it in traditional private equity categories, while Growth Capital, co-authored with Italian Tech Alliance, uses modern vertical segmentation and includes large rounds and deals done outside Italy. Both agree on the figure neither headlined: first-time cheques fell from 110 to 95, so the money went up while the number of companies funded went down. The episode sets Italy against Europe's €44bn across 5,330 rounds and asks why a market this size still lands where it does. It covers the 59% pre-seed and seed skew, why Niccolò says Italy doesn't yet have a true barbell, and the business-angel tax incentive that expired at the start of the year. It looks at what actually absorbed the capital — Weroad, Smartness, Lexroom and Niulinx — and why the record half was carried by applied and vertical software rather than the deeptech and biomedical deals Italy has historically pushed. The conversation closes on two rounds: Circular Materials' €11.8M SAFE from CDP Venture Capital, the EIC Fund, EIT RawMaterials and 360 Capital, built on an End-of-Waste licence very few holders have, and ORiS' €5M pre-seed led by Earlybird, a German fund taking the lead position on a Politecnico di Torino spinout.Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomolloListen to all episodes on audio:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQGoogle Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RCApple Podcast: https://apple.co/3ElhykqAmazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9Get in touch:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxxTwitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomolloEmail: giacomo@in3.ventures#venturecapital #italy #startup

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  The Week in Italian Startup

  Europe's €2.4 billion fusion champion is built by Italians on German Tech #209

  Jul 14, 202621 min

  Proxima Fusion, nuclear fusion, stellarator technology, Italian founders and CDP Venture Capital anchor this episode on Europe's largest fusion round ever: €411M at a €2.4 billion valuation. The Max Planck Institute spin-out is headquartered in Munich, will likely build its first plant in Bavaria, and counts Google, RWE, KfW Capital, SPRIND and quant-finance investors among ~21 backers — with Italy's CDP re-upping as a returning investor. A €2.4B valuation for a company with zero revenue and a demonstrator by 2030 means fusion has been re-priced from science risk to execution risk. Italy is hedging the race across competing technologies: CDP backs Proxima's stellarator while Eni has been one of the largest investors in Commonwealth Fusion Systems' tokamak since 2018. Then Young Platform, the Italian crypto exchange, raises €22.5M in a growth round from Azimut — a bet on regulation rather than hype, with MiCAR authorization covering 8 of 10 crypto services, first in Italy by breadth, in a market that has clearly cooled off. Finally, Primo Capital launches Primo Space Fund 2 with a €120M target for space technology and dual-use applications, €70M+ in expressions of interest before first close and Roberto Battiston advising. The through-line: Italy didn't miss the fusion race — it paid to be on the sidelines.Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomolloListen to all episodes on audio:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQGoogle Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RCApple Podcast: https://apple.co/3ElhykqAmazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9Get in touch:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxxTwitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomolloEmail: giacomo@in3.ventures#venturecapital #italy #startup

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  The Week in Italian Startup

  What Italy's €730M VC Funding Number Hides #208

  Jul 7, 202617 min

  Italian startup funding, venture capital, D-Orbit, Satispay, WeRoad, CDP and the dealflowit H1 2026 data anchor this episode on why Italy's ~€730M half-year is concentration, not depth. The top three rounds account for roughly 40% of the total and the top five for about 60%, so stripping out the breakouts leaves an ordinary half. The most active investor isn't a private VC — it's CDP, the state, with 91 investments — while business angels stay busy at pre-seed and the biggest checks at the top come increasingly from foreign players like Airbnb, which led WeRoad. We put €730M in context: it's roughly half Italy's ~€1.5–1.6B annual ceiling, and 2025 leaned on an exceptional ~€800M fourth quarter, so the back half of 2026 has a steep bar. We also note that only one top name, Lexroom, is AI-native, and that rising average round sizes (Series C near €46M) signal a maturing but still-shallow market. Then MDOTM: a $27M growth round from Expedition Growth Capital, with its Sphere platform already touching $100B+ in assets across 60+ institutions including Morgan Stanley, Amundi and Zurich Bank. Finally Alia Mentis, a 2012 advanced-composites maker, debuts on Euronext Growth Milan up 35% on day one, oversubscribed, on about €15M revenue and €8.5M EBITDA — a 58% margin — with a founder who kept 67% after a mostly bootstrapped path. The through-line: Italy didn't have a record half-year — three companies did.Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomolloListen to all episodes on audio:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQGoogle Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RCApple Podcast: https://apple.co/3ElhykqAmazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9Get in touch:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxxTwitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomolloEmail: giacomo@in3.ventures#venturecapital #italy #startup

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  The Week in Italian Startup

  Google Built Search for Humans. Seltz Builds It for AI #207

  Jun 30, 202612 min

  AI agent search, agentic web search, and the retrieval layer take center stage as Seltz raises a €12.5M seed to rebuild search for AI agents rather than humans. Founder Antonio Mallia — NYU PhD in information retrieval, ex-Amazon AGI, ex-Pinecone — argues agents fire hundreds of precise queries in parallel and need machine-readable passages in under 200 milliseconds, not ten blue links. We discuss why Seltz takes the harder bet of owning the crawler, index, and retrieval layer instead of orchestrating on top of existing indexes. We unpack the cap table — Speedinvest, B Capital, Italian Founders Fund, United Ventures, and Bain's Future Back Ventures — and what it signals about global ambition with an Italian-founder backbone. We look at a category already minting unicorns: Tavily acquired for up to $400M, Parallel at a ~$2B valuation, Exa at $85M, and ask whether this is the first search era with no winner-takes-all. Then two Italian €3.2M rounds — Compri in AI procurement and Kalipso in regtech — frame the shift from SaaS to "software as labor," where buyers purchase outcomes instead of tools. It's a look at where search, agents, and "boring AI" workflows are heading next.Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomolloListen to all episodes on audio:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQGoogle Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RCApple Podcast: https://apple.co/3ElhykqAmazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9Get in touch:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxxTwitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomolloEmail: giacomo@in3.ventures#venturecapital #italy #startup

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  The Week in Italian Startup

  Why startups will fail MORE according to Anthropic #206

  Jun 24, 202614 min

  Anthropic's Founder's Playbook argues startups will fail MORE as AI shrinks idea-to-product from months to a weekend, removing the forced question every founder used to answer: does anyone want this? The 42% of startups that die building what nobody wants is set to climb, so the real test moves from "can you build it?" to "should you build it?" We get into AI-driven confirmation bias — how it constructs a fundable-looking case for a bad idea — and why a prototype is now just a prop for real user conversations. Diligence shifts from artifact quality to evidence of demand: retention, repeat usage, actual usage. We cover why the moat moves to workflow lock-in and proprietary data, why the next elite founder is an AI architect rather than the best coder, and whether the seed round is quietly losing its old rationale. Then two Italian deep-tech seed rounds: X-nano's €3.7M for synthetic graphite for lithium-ion batteries, and Rainbow Crops' €9.7M for AI-powered crop engineering. Closing on Niccolò's newsletter hitting its 300th issue.Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomolloListen to all episodes on audio:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQGoogle Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RCApple Podcast: https://apple.co/3ElhykqAmazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9Get in touch:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxxTwitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomolloEmail: giacomo@in3.ventures#venturecapital #italy #startup

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