Led · Equity · Jun 2024

Recuperiamo, founded in 2016 as a Società Benefit and PMI innovativa, operates the Regusto platform to enable companies to donate or sell stock at risk of waste while tracing flows on blockchain. The platform converts operational data into impact tokens and provides socio-environmental reporting that companies can include in sustainability statements. Recuperiamo reports double-digit growth in onboarding and today has more than 2,000 companies and entities on its platform, including a Regusto network of 600+ corporate partners and 1,000 non-profits. Operational volumes exceed 300 tonnes of goods managed and donated per month; in 2023 the company reports over 14 million meals distributed and overall impact figures of 25+ million meal equivalents recovered, 19,000 tonnes of CO2 avoided, and savings in water and soil metrics. The company is launching a five-year development plan that includes internationalization by late 2024/early 2025, investment in R&D for its waste-management platform, AI integration for recovery-data analysis and impact reporting, and a public blockchain registry to certify impact in real time. It also plans to strengthen sales and marketing, relaunch corporate sites and expand the Impatto Positivo network.

Led · Seed · Dec 2023

Cents develops an Impact-as-a-Service (IAAS) platform to make ESG frameworks and CSR practices immediate, traceable and accountable for e-commerce, banks, credit unions and financial institutions. Founded in April 2021 by Riccardo Valobra and Alessio Mazzalupi and based in Perugia, the company is building a B2B and B2B2C offering to let companies seamlessly integrate social and environmental causes into their core business. The platform connects partners with over 50 non-profit organisations, including Telethon, Save the Children and Oxfam Italy, and uses a cloud serverless architecture plus an in-house machine-learning AI engine to match donors and causes and simplify donation processing. Cents raised €1.15 million in a pre-seed round to launch the IAAS platform, expand its NGO network and consolidate and grow the internal team. Management plans rapid headcount growth through 2025, acquisition of strategic partners in Italy, and aims to reach metrics to close a Seed round within 24 months and position the platform as a European benchmark. The company emphasizes transparency in reporting supported projects to improve matching and overcome evaluative bias.

Led · Equity · Oct 2023

BugsLife is a Perugia-based startup that farms black soldier fly larvae to produce protein flours for pet food and organic fertilizers. The company sources agricultural byproducts — cereal and legume flours, silo-cleaning residues, olive pomace, brewer's yeast, brewers' grains and grape marc — from local farms to create larval substrates. It has developed an IT system that recommends which local byproducts to combine and in what proportions to obtain the ideal substrate for larval growth. Led by Caterina Luppa and Giacomo Zeni, BugsLife emphasizes a sustainable, reproducible model attentive to the territory. Founded in 2019, the startup seeks to make the agroindustrial ecosystem more sustainable through circular use of farm waste. Its current disclosed financing event is a €552,000 round led by SICI sgr/Fondo Umbria Ricerca e Innovazione with participation from entrepreneurs and business angels.

Led · Equity · Jan 2017

Vino75 is a Florence, Italy–based digital wine shop offering over 1,800 wine labels and representing 600 wine producers. The company provides a SaaS platform that enables Italian agri-food companies to manage their business and optimize cost and timing, as well as a B2B platform dedicated to buyers. Led by CEO Andrea Nardi Dei and hosted by NanaBianca in Florence, Vino75 combines direct-to-consumer retail with enterprise software for the hospitality and food sectors. The company signed a cooperation agreement with Alibaba’s TMAll Direct to bring 10 Italian wineries to the Chinese market, with plans to increase that number to at least 100. Vino75 raised €1.5m and intends to use the funds to develop its platform internationally and to consolidate the domestic market with new dedicated services for the Hotellerie-Restaurant-Café industry. Vino75 is a wine ecommerce company based in Florence, Italy, that combines technology and tradition to sell wine online. It offers a catalog of over 900 labels from 200 producers and serves 37,000 subscribers. The company was co-founded by Andrea Nardi-Dei, Elisa Scapin, Diego Di Sepio and Francesco Limberti and was incubated at Florence-based accelerator NanaBianca. Vino75 intends to use new funding to expand into international markets and extend its catalog by adding producers from abroad. The company has set a growth target to reach 300k subscribers.

Led · Equity · Oct 2012

Alga Energy is a newly formed company based in Lucca, Italy, focused on electricity production from algae. Its core approach is cultivating algae and deriving vegetable oil from the biomass to generate electricity by burning the oil. The company plans a two-stage project: create a pre-industrial scale pilot facility to cultivate and grow algae and then build electricity production on an area of over 7,000m2 using algae-derived vegetable oil. The project also includes requalification of the ex Cucirini area of the city of Lucca. To finance the programme, Alga Energy is to receive a €3m venture capital investment provided by Sviluppo Imprese Centro Italia through Fondo Toscana Innovazione. No operating metrics or revenues are disclosed in the article.