Friday, April 11, 2014

Cerved Group invest €1,35M in SpazioDati

Milan, 2nd April 2014 - SpazioDati, a cutting-edge start-up specialized in the management and semantic analysis of big data, especially of open and proprietary data from web and social media, has signed strategic partnership with Cerved Group, a leading Italian company specialized in business analysis and the development of risk assessment models, intended to create innovative applications of research, analysis and data management for new decision-making models guided by intelligence information.

The agreement foresees the entry of Cerved in the shareholding of SpazioDati with a minority stake of €1.35M by subscribing a reserved capital increase and partly by taking over some of the shareholders' shares.

Founded in 2012, the startup has developed cutting-edge technologies to improve the management processes of the growing volume of data within organizations, enabling new dimensions of analysis and exploitation of information assets. Its core business, in fact, is focused in the development of cloud technologies able to connect, filter, analyze and contextualize data from public (Open) and proprietary sources so that they can be easily used by developers and companies.

One example is the recent Telecom Big Data Challenge, in which SpazioDati has made available its platform dandelion.eu to allow more than 1,000 developers from around the world to analyze millions of phone data related to weather data, demographics, environmental pollution, vehicular traffic and social media to make analysis and applications with high added value.

With headquarters in Trento and Pisa, the start-up, which operates with the support of the European Institute of Technology, counts among its investors the Chamber of Commerce of Pisa and Trento Rise, who initially believed in the vision of this research project  on big data that is fuelling, both in Italy and in Europe, a supply chain in steady expansion.

Expansion mainly due to the exponential growth in the volume of data generated by social networks, networks of intelligent sensors, the Internet of Things, mobile devices and by individual companies and their employees, which, according to IDC predictions, is expected to double every two years, increasing the value of a market, that big data, which is estimated to reach 23.8 billion dollars by 2016.

Based on the agreement signed, Marco Nespolo and Pietro Masera, respectively, Chief Operating Officer and director of corporate development at Cerved Group, will enter the Board of Directors of SpazioDati alongside Gabriele Antonelli and Michele Barbera, Chairman and CEO of the company and the other partner founder Luca Pieraccini. The operation was followed for the legal aspects by law firm Gattai Minoli & Partners for Cerved Group and the law firm Chiomenti for SpazioDati.

"This investment - says Gianandrea De Bernardis , CEO of Cerved Group - plays a strong strategic value for our Group, which has built its own leadership on the transformation of data in complete and timely prospective analysis for its stakeholders ."

The expertise in the economic and financial of business and the uniqueness of our extensive database combined with the technological capabilities of the tools of SpazioDati - continues De Bernardis - open up the possibility of developing cutting-edge products really able to make multidimensional searchs thus enabling an observation of economic phenomena from a privileged point of view than others. "

"The partnership and investment of Cerved Group in SpazioDati are a key step that opens up new scenarios. Until now, most of the innovative potential of a host of independent developers and SMEs has been limited by the difficulty of access to quality economic information . By partnering with Cerved we can revolutionize this industry , "said Michele Barbera , CEO of SpazioDati.

Cerved Group is the leader in Italy in the analysis of companies and the development of models for evaluating credit risk.

SpazioDati is a startup that operates in the area of ​​Big Data and Web Semantic. Its main product, dandelion.eu, allows users to analyze and enrich their content by connecting them to the Knowledge Graph of SpazioDati, which contains millions of data points, obtained by combining Open Data sources with high quality proprietary data  provided by the partners of SpazioDati.