Qurami raises €590k in seed funding from UniCredit Start Lab, LVenture Group and Italian Angels for Growth (IAG)

Less than 10 months after the launch of the program acceleration UniCredit Start Lab, sponsored by UniCredit to encourage the development of innovative Italian startups, the bank has delivered its first investment in favor of Qurami, a young Roman company which is developing an app that eliminates queues.

The investment of total €590k was carried out by UniCredit, in cooperation with LVenture Group, one of the first operators of Seed Venture Capital listed on the MTA of the Italian Stock Exchange, and other business angels of the Italian Angels for Growth (IAG) network. Qurami is the first startup, among those involved in the UniCredit Start Lab - whose first edition of the program has attracted numerous startups operating in different sectors, from Life Science to ICT, from the Made in Italy to Cleantech - in which UniCredit steps in with a direct investment. The company stood out for its ability to capture market needs and translate them into business ideas. 

The investment round will now allow

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wiMAN Raises €700K in Seed Funding from TIM Ventures, P101 and Club Italia Investimenti 2.

Milan/Bologna, December 19th, 2014 - WiMAN, among the most extended social Wi-Fi networks in Italy, opens up its capital to a pool of investors led by Tim Ventures, a company of the Telecom Italia Group born to invest in the best Italian digital startups, and by P101, operator of venture capital promoted by Andrea Di Camillo. Among the new shareholders there is is also Club Italia Investimenti 2. The overall investment amounts to €700k.

Founded in 2012 by Massimo Ciuffreda (CEO and co-founder) and Michele di Mauro (CTO and co-founder) WiMAN was initially backed by Matteo Riffeser Monti as business angel and by the accelerator NanaBianca that has financially followed the capital increase. 

The company was founded in 2009 with a clear mission: to bring the wifi throughout the country and reset at once the digital divide. In 2011 the founders decided to risk everything again and invested their savings of a lifetime to start a new adventure: WiMAN officially becomes a startup! Starting from scratch was not easy; but as always passion and tenacity prevailed.

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TIM Ventures invests €410k in Pedius

TIM Ventures, the company  of the Telecom Italia Group has made its first step in the venture capital space in support of the best digital startups and, along with Sistema Investmenti and Embed Capital, has invested a total of €410k in Pedius, the Rome, Italy-based startup that led by Lorenzo Ciaccio and with a team of 8 people, has developed a communication system that allows hearing impaired people to perform normal phone calls by means of speech recognition and vocal synthesis technologies.

You can use in your everyday life to make important calls such as booking doctors appointments or making reservations or to call family, friends and co-workers. Once you download the Smartphone app you can start a conversation by either typing or speaking a message. The person you are calling will hear this and reply, and you will immediately read a transcription of what he or she just said. 

Pedius gives you the freedom to have real-time conversations when you need to call a plumber, book a table at your favourite restaurant, or talk to you doctor. All this is done with full respect for your privacy because you're the only one who sees the communication between you and those you speak with.

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U-Start Ventures: a new VC Fund targeting at raising €30M to support Italian Digital & Tech Startups

Milan, 15 December 2014 - U-Start, a Milan, Italy-based global boutique advisory firm, founded in 2012, focused on direct and direct venture capital investments providing fully fledged services to private investors - family offices and high-net-worth individuals - corporations and early stage companies in the search for investment opportunities and companies at international level, has launched U-Start Ventures, the VC fund that will invest on early-growth stage companies in the digital & tech space. The fundraising phase aims to raise €30M by the end of 2015, although the fund will be operational when it will held the first closing expected by the first quarter of 2015 at €10M.

U-Start Ventures will make use of the expertise and resources of U-Start, which are characterized by a strong territorial trait: teams based in Brazil, Russia, South Africa, Switzerland, Ukraine, Turkey, Mexico, Chile and Italy, that thanks to a thorough knowledge of the area and of the local players, offer advice to potential international investors by identifying and analyzing for them the most interesting deals on the market. Thanks to extensive and developed network of service providers operating in the territory U-Start may, in fact, provide support in the due diligence of the business, financial and legal, both locally and internationally.

According to a company note, the VC fund will

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D-Orbit raises €2.2M in VC Funding from Como Venture and Quadrivio SGR

Milan, 11 December 2014 - D-Orbit, young company operating in the aerospace sector and promoter of innovation and technological development aimed at mitigating the impending problem of 'space junk', cuts the ribbon of a new successfully completed investment round in its fundraising path. 

The company did involve in this round old and new financial investors: Quadrivio Capital SGR, which accompanied and supported D-Orbit in all its path since its birth, and Como Venture, one of the most active financial realities in the world Italian start-ups. D-Orbit raised €2.2M in VC Funding, respectively €1.95M from Quadrivio through its TTSeed and TTVenture funds (the Quadrivio segment focused on venture capital) and €250k from Como Venture.

D-Orbit, active in the development of decommissioning systems of satellites (i.e. systems responsible for the safe and controlled removal of satellites at the end of their service life), in just over three years has been internationalized, with a strong presence in Europe and the United States States, has qualified its innovative device, has signed promising partnerships of a commercial nature and has received recognition and support from space agencies around the world: among others ASI, ESA and NASA.

The company founded in 2011 by the idea of four young aerospace engineers, thanks to the support of the TT Venture fund (the segment focused on venture capital of Quadrivio), has, over the years, and with continuity, collected significant successes that have allowed it to become a small but dynamic company able to make deals with the big players in the industry.

The fundraising path does not ends with this investment round, but will continue in 2015 with the aim to attract more foreign and Italian investors.

Luca Rossettini, first founder and CEO of the company, publicly thanked Quadrivio for the support it has been able to provide in the recent years contributing to the company's growth, and Como Venture that will

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