Hephaestus Ventures launches HV labs startup accelerator and starts €100M venture fund

Hephaestus Ventures is a private equity fund supporting the growth of Corporate Venture Capital through the creation of an accelerator in Milan called HV Labs to support the expansion abroad of Italian Companies towards Brazil, United States, China, South Africa, Russia and India, United Kingdom and Germany on projects of Open Innovation and Digital Trasformation in these verticals: FinTech, Energy, Smart Mobility , Digital Health.

Trough the creation of the accelerator for digital startups Hephaestus Ventures will move from a private equity fund to be a seed venture company and will support all the corporate companies that have plans to expand to emerging markets and the United States and all those open innovation projects that will lead to the creation of corporate spin-offs and will be a fund of position from seed to series A to favor later stage and acceleration of the startups up to the support towards the internationalisation towards the reference markets that the company is approaching such us the United States, BRICS, and Germany and England in Europe. Currently it is the only one of its kind on the Italian market. Competitor is the Dutch Startupbootcamp. The fund targets to raise €100M of private capital in 7 years. It won't collaborate with public funds or public fundings either as regards fund raising or for investment with portfolio startups. It is planned to start mid-2018 with 8 startups and to reach about 25 startups by mid-2020.