Eureka!'s Monthly #7
Dear All,
despite the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the downturn of global venture capital investments in Q1 2023 and “ChatGPT” affair, plenty of things happened in the last month and half and we cannot wait to reveal it to you!
In this chapter of our newsletter we will focus on the new investments by Eureka! Fund and BlackSheep Madtech Fund; we will mention important events our colleagues had the honor to attend to as speakers; we will talk about topics discussed during podcasts with Stefano Peroncini, Anna Amati and Umberto Bottesini, unique moments of sharing which offer important food for thought.
Enjoy your reading!
Eureka! Team
Portfolio Companies
We are thrilled to announce that Caracol AM, Eureka! Fund's portfolio company and leader in industrial large-scale 3D printing, closed a new €10.6M investment round on 3rd March.
Thanks to this new important investment round, we are renewing Eureka!'s trust in Caracol AM and its brilliant team, which has demonstrated its ability to effectively implement an ambitious technological and business development plan, integrating and enhancing robotics and additive manufacturing, with a distinctive approach in terms of circularity and sustainability.
(Stefano Peroncini’s quote)
Kudos to the entire team and welcome to new prestigious institutionals investors, CDP Venture Capital SGR and Neva SGR.
If you know more about the main objectives of this new round, have a look at the article!
Let’s keep going with the second Eureka! Fund’s portfolio company: Phononic Vibes S.r.l..
For those who do not, Phononic Vibes designs and makes innovative solutions in the field of acoustic and vibroacoustic metamaterial technologies for noise and vibration attenuation and sound quality improvement. Aligned with its mission, the company works in an environmentally friendly manner, choosing recycled raw materials mostly (Phononic’s technologies do not depend on material used, as they work on the shape).
Besides working on the sustainability of the raw material, Phononic Vibes also monitors the sustainability of the manufacturing process, trying to minimize the purchase of virgin raw materials in the first place.
Phononic Vibes is a concrete example from the Eureka! Fund’s portfolio of what can be done for a positive impact on the planet! Thanks to EconomyUp for picking up such an important topic!
Talking about health tech, we are going to discuss about Endostart S.r.l. and Wise S.r.l..
Endostart S.r.l. reached another great achievement thanks to Prof. Ottaviano Tarantino from Ospedale San Giuseppe in Empoli (Tuscany), and Dr. Saverio Alicante from Ospedale Maggiore in Crema.
Both surgeons treated several patients using the innovative technology patented by Endostart, as they do believe in it. This is clear evidence that difficult colonoscopy treatments can be overcome with Endorail.
If you want to know how Endorail works, have a look at Dr. Saverio Alicante’s LinkdIn profile, there is an interesting video on it.
Last but not least, Luca Ravagnan, CEO of Wise S.r.l., attended "A VIEW ON ITALIAN VENTURE CAPITAL" event on 9 February, backed by CDP Cassa Depositi e Prestiti at the Innovit - Italian Innovation and Culture Hub in San Francisco.
WISE S.r.l. had the privilege of presenting its innovative technologies, following an overview of the booming Italian venture-capital ecosystem showed by CDP members.
A moment to enhance the concept of innovation in the Italian market!
Let’s jump to BlackSheep Madtech Fund’s Portfolio updates.
We are very proud to celebrate the seventh investment of BlackSheep MadTech Fund. We officially announced on 15th March our participation as lead investor (€5M Series A funding round) in Nexoya, the first AI Omni-channel campaigns autopilot in Europe.
Nexoya is a SaaS platform based on artificial intelligence and machine learning that allows the aggregation of all data from multichannel marketing campaigns, such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, data from the CRM, analytics system, eCommerce site and data from external sources, such as exchange rates or weather conditions. More details are available by clicking on the website StartupItalia.
On the other hand, we would like to share with you another important event: ID Ward launched their new brand Anonymised.
Anonymised is the first anonymised targeting platform for publishers and advertisers which is able to reshape digital marketing for the cookieless world.
If you want to know more about their potentials, dive into: Anonymised.
Meet-up with Eureka!
We are extremely happy to announce that our CEO Stefano Peroncini took part to the event organized by CDP Venture Capital SGR and the national network of accelerators in Milan, on 6 March, as a speaker.
Together with Ezio Ravaccia, from Solar Ventures Capital, and Alessandro Scortecci, from CDP Venture Capital SGR, Stefano addressed two topics that are significantly influencing the course of investments: energy transition and sustainability.
We were honored to have such a great opportunity to share our insights and to be in direct contact with the industry leaders.
Besides the event above mentioned, Stefano was asked for his opinion about the Silicon Valley Bank matter. The Silicon Valley Bank case, among the most important bank failures since the 2008 crisis and the fastest in history, was the topic discussed on Giornale Radio. He tried to give his personal key to understand the anomalous situation and its repercussions on the startup ecosystem, the most affected by this striking collapse.
Silicon Valley Bank is not the umpteenth black swan, it is rather a mix of inexperience and lack of supervision of the system. The risk is a new collapse of trust in everyone: CEO and management, media and monetary and supervisory authorities.
(Stefano Peroncini’s quote)
Let’s focus on another Eureka!’s team member; on 29th/30th/31st Anna Amati attended the TECH COLLIDER – a Knowledge Share event, as keynote speaker.
The Knowledge Share free digital event is focused on innovations which have benefited from the PoC (Proof of concept) grant, awarded by the Italian Ministry of Enterprises and Made In Italy.
3 days and 9 webinars about Healthcare & Biomedical, Green Tech, Renewable Energy Sources, Construction & Architecture e Industry 4.0.
Last but not least we would like to recall the interview “Forbes Leader” organized by SkyItalia to Umberto Bottesini:
Big Tech layoffs are not the beginning of a 'tech winter', they are the consequence of a complex transition, where technology companies are embracing change by investing huge resources in process automation.
Although at first this may seem like the beginning of a man-machine substitution path, we will discover how much this will turn out to be a process of transformation of our professionalism towards more specialized tasks, where our qualities can be better expressed and not simply used repetitively. The new EU rules to regulate the digital marketing market open up unprecedented growth opportunities for Italian and European start-ups, and this is where venture capital comes in.
(Umberto Bottesini’s quote)
Do not miss his interview, click on the green button!
Catch-up with the Team
As in all our newsletters, there is a section dedicated to a member of our team and this time we are really excited to introduce Anna Amati to you.
Anna is one pillar of the company and has a lot of knowledge; she is always ready to share and support anyone who asks for help.
Anna was born in Terni and since she was a child she breathed the power of technological production and value of innovation for companies and territory in which they operate. She was always surrounded by strong female figures who pushed her to study harder and become independent.
Anna has a degree in architecture and she still practices. In 1992, moved by the passion of doing better, she created META together with a group of brilliant researchers with international experience, trying to look up for tools to improve the quality of life and well-being of people and territories.
In 2019 with Eureka!, she focused on the following principle: encouraging the birth of start-ups by investing in the utilization of research results generated by researchers from universities and research centers, in order to get a return on investment and, at the same time, create a strong impact on society.
Talking to Anna, we realized how sensitive the issue of the gender gap is for her. That’s way she is in charge of Eureka!’s ESG processes.
That feeling has always pushed her to study harder, to be always ready for the next challenges and to look for financial independence.
She does believe that it is necessary to improve expertise in order to create something better not only for us but also for the next generation and the entire ecosystem.
Anna works hard traveling all over Italy to provide concrete support to researchers who have come up with a brilliant project and to enable them to turn this virtuous idea into a business that can best meet the needs of the market.
Above all Anna is the mother of three children who have inherited from her the hunger for knowledge, freedom and the desire to be independent. Anna supports them and spurs them on to do better and better, to not settle, without ever losing work-life balance.
She has sound principles and has always told herself that she would not submit to people she did not hold in esteem, she would earn a decent living without compromising. She is an optimistic person who always sees the good in things and people.
Thank you Anna for opening up with us and spreading such good energy. You are a clear example of how it is possible to reconcile private and entrepreneurship life and being a Founder.
Things worth to share
We are extremely proud to announce that Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Phononic Vibes, won “The Frontiers of Knowledge Award” on 8th February for transforming chip design from a handcrafted process to the automated industry that powers today’s electronic devices.
As well as a “prolific inventor” and “outstanding educator” who has created a global school of thought from UC Berkeley, he is also the founder of Cadence and Synopsis, two firms at the forefront of the electronics industry that produce the software used to design the chips that power all the smart devices built today.
By providing software tools to ease the creation of complex chips, he made possible a worldwide explosion of integrated circuit design spanning research, industry and academia. Professor Sangiovanni Vincentelli created a rich ecosystem of electronic design automation (EDA) techniques that revolutionized – and remain at the core of – how we build computer systems.
To know more about the topic, watch the video.
Another topic we want to focus on for a moment is the Chatgpt matter, a very sensitive issue that has been shaking the world of venture capital and technology in recent weeks.
Here too, a clear and qualified view can be provided by our colleague Umberto Bottesini: as was foreseeable, an alignment at the continental level begins Germany, Ireland, France, and Spain are considering following the same position as the Italian regulator.
This is not happening because we are a continent of “retrograde conservatives”, but because we have been harshly through the lack of regulation of the first phase of the Internet. Certainly, this deregulation has not given us that "liberating" instrument that was instead on the premises of the project. We hope that at least on this point we will all agree.
We conclude our newsletter with an excerpt from Umberto Bottesini's point of view:
The main risk is that what has happened in the past may happen again: the AI field really represents the second era of digital, and as happened with the 'first internet' the risk is that we find ourselves in a new Wild West where tech giants can conquer markets by taking advantage of the absence of a shared rules system. This is the worst scenario for venture capitalists like us: our job is to invest in emerging technologies, in new companies that can compete with market leaders without being penalised by different regulations that create competitive imbalances.
(Umberto Bottesini’s quote)
That’s all for today!
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