HeyJaredThe Week in Italian Startup
The Week in Italian Startup discusses and analyzes the latest news from the Italian startup ecosystem. Giacomo Mollo is a former academic in philosophy turned tech investor. He is co-founder and partner of iN3 Ventures, a corporate innovation and VC firm.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 22, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 7, 2026
Latest episodes
Exein Hits $1.7B: Italy Built a Unicorn #213 (opens the original)
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Exein raised $270M at a $1.7B valuation — roughly €234m at about €1.45bn — making it Italy's newest unicorn in embedded IoT and firmware cybersecurity, with no Italian investor named in the round. We track the climb: a €70M Series C led by Balderton in July 2025 above €350M, then €100M in December 2025 split roughly half equity and half debt with the equity led by Blue Cloud Ventures near €700M, and now a round that doubles the price again. Niccolò Sanarico calls it what it is: an overnight succ
Miro Sold at 90% Off to Bending Spoons. The Sellers Reinvested $295M. #212 (opens the original)
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Bending Spoons is buying Miro for $1.355B in enterprise value, all cash, roughly 90% below Miro's $17.5B valuation from January 2022, and some Miro shareholders are reinvesting $295M of their payout into newly issued Bending Spoons shares. Giacomo reads that as a hedge on Bending Spoons' operations; Niccolò Sanarico suggests it may simply have been a condition to close the deal. On paper Miro is a stellar business: about $600M in ARR, 250,000 organizations, around 90% of revenue from businesses
Europe's Biggest AI Round Is Mostly Debt #211 (opens the original)
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Domyn, Europe's largest AI round, is mostly debt: $1.1B raised, roughly 90% of it borrowed against 6,000 Nvidia chips in southern Italy, leaving an equity cheque of about $110M. That structure is the episode. A deal that began as a substantial Series A in 2024–25 became infrastructure financing, and Niccolò Sanarico's read is blunt: this is not pure-play venture capital, it is another beast. From there we split AI sovereignty into its real layers — where data sits, who controls the model, who op
Fewer startups, bigger cheques - H1 2026 in Italian Venture Capital #210 (opens the original)
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Italian startup funding in H1 2026 came in at €679M according to VeM and €813M according to Growth Capital — two official venture capital reports on the same six months, €134M apart, and both correct. Giacomo Mollo and Niccolò Sanarico break down why the two observatories count differently: VeM tracks institutional, tech-transfer-heavy activity in Italian-incorporated companies and classifies it in traditional private equity categories, while Growth Capital, co-authored with Italian Tech Allianc
Europe's €2.4 billion fusion champion is built by Italians on German Tech #209 (opens the original)
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Proxima Fusion, nuclear fusion, stellarator technology, Italian founders and CDP Venture Capital anchor this episode on Europe's largest fusion round ever: €411M at a €2.4 billion valuation. The Max Planck Institute spin-out is headquartered in Munich, will likely build its first plant in Bavaria, and counts Google, RWE, KfW Capital, SPRIND and quant-finance investors among ~21 backers — with Italy's CDP re-upping as a returning investor. A €2.4B valuation for a company with zero revenue and a d
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