Stefano Bernardi is the editor of theStartup.eu, a weblog that covers the european startup scene, focused on technology companies, web applications, social media, growth entrepreneurship and venture capital.
He founded several successful websites and in February 2008, while living in Madrid, Spain, he founded his first company: Hosteeo LLC, providing hosting services and server management.
Stefano is studying computer engineering in Roma Tre University in Rome, Italy.
Fubles.com, the Italian social sport community just raised €300,000 from well-known Italian investors.
The round was led by Pino Partecipazioni, an investor in Yoox, Tiscali and Venere. Other investors include Marco Magnocavallo, who recently sold Blogo, Gianandrea Cherubini, a partner at Vantage Investment Management and Carmine Giangiulio of Unicredit.
Hotelyo, a “Vente Privée” for exclusive and luxurious hotels, has raised close to €1 million in an angel round. That’s pretty impressive for Italy’s standards.
The company already has a turnover of around €500,000 and to-date provides offers for 14 heavily discounted luxury hotels every seven days with more expected to come on board in the next few months. Hotelyo has around 300,000 members, mostly thanks to word of mouth. Properties are selected from a range of beautiful hotels throughout all of Europe and often include exotic destinations from around the world. Availability for these offers is limited and the fastest bookings receive additional discounts, while membership is free and the site guarantees new offers twice a week.
H-Farm, the Italian VC-slash-incubator-slash-holding company based in the countryside near Venice, just announced the opening of their new Seed Program.
H-Farm will provide financing for three months worth of development, in which teams will work in their new Startup Village, and claims it will take a minority share in each company, but doesn’t add specific details. We’re guessing around 15-20%. The first batch will include 5 startups.
Some 150 people attended the inaugural party of EnLabs (Entrepreneurship Laboratories) yesterday evening. The new 40-desk incubator based in Rome, is open to all entrepreneurs with early stage and start-up aspirations.
The initiative was founded by Luigi Capello, a serial entrepreneur turned business angel who, through investment opportunities, was able to experience and try firsthand the effectiveness of such structures in the U.S., particularly in Silicon Valley.
Spreaker, an Italian music startup that offers an application for creating and sharing live audio content on the Internet, has raised €300k in an angel round. The funding comes from 11 Italian angel investors, and was closed through IAG (Italian Angels for Growth), an independent association born in 2007 with 60 business angels.
With Spreaker, users become Radio DJs and host personal radio shows that can be streamed live and listened to through a widget which supports all the major social media and mobile platforms. Spreaker went live in ‘beta’ at the beginning of the year. They claim 10,000 users transmitting music, news, live sports reports etc. Visitors are around the 200k mark, and they can both listen and interact with the content.
Mopapp, a Software-as-a-Service that allows application developers to retrieve, analyze and chart the downloads, upgrades, sales, revenues and profit of their mobile applications, just launched its private beta. And we have invites.
The most interesting aspect of the product is that it’s cross-platform and cross-store, and it automatically integrates with most major stores (Apple iTunes App Store, Google Android Market, RIM App World, Handango, MobiHand and counting), to allow developers to compare their sales on the different platforms and stores. It also creates reports and detailed analytics by country, device and currency.
MusiXmatch, a “lyrics in the cloud” company, has announced €400k of new seed funding.
The Italian company is tackling the online music lyrics space, and whilst there are already tons of websites offering free lyrics, very few, if any, actually have the rights to do so. Additionally, Max Ciociola, MusiXmatch’s founder and CEO noticed that the word “lyrics” is one of the most searched for terms on Google in the US and worldwide.
GigsWiz, a Helsinki-based analytics service for the live music industry, has grabbed €150,000 in a seed round of funding.
The service basically helps music bands interact with their fans with a widget on their site. During the beta phase bands can collect requests from fans – “where do you want us to play live?” – through the GigsWiz tool on their websites. They can then view the data plotted on a map or as charts and lists. “So far bands have had a rather vague picture of their regional and international fan base by looking at the traffic to their web pages. Now they can measure the actual interest to attend a concert and be inform the fans when the tickets come on sale” says Juuso Vermasheinä, responsible for customer development.
These are the latest VC deals happening around Europe that we’ve unearthed. Germany is still going strong, but France and Spain are keeping up pretty well.
Aepona, the Belfast-based developer of a software engine that powers the “Network as a Service” (NaaS) business model for mobile operators, has just raised a $10M round, led by new investor BlackBerry Partners Fund, a Toronto-based global fund focused on applications, services and supporting infrastructure for mobile platforms.
[Italy] Rome-based iWikiPhone, a social network for iPhone users where they can discover, share and discuss the best apps, has closed a €250k round of funding. The money comes from a number of private investors and also from Egolab, a Rome based company specializing in online media. Egolab has provided 100k of funding by way of services and a cash investment in return for 20% equity in the company.
With 100,000 apps available from the iPhone App store, finding the good ones is becoming increasingly difficult. iWikiPhone’s answer is that the best way to discover the most interesting and relevant apps for Apple’s smartphone is through recommendations from friends and from knowing which apps your friends are actually using.
The most interesting part, however, is that they also plan to crowdsource ideas for new iPhone apps from the iWikiPhone community. Users will be able to suggest apps and make money. The “idea owner” will be paid $500 and a share of revenue generated through selling the app in the iPhone App Store, which of course is how iWikiPhone plans to make money too.
[France] Wozaik, a Paris-based startup which is developing a dynamic bookmarking system, is giving away 200 invites for an exclusive preview of their platform to Techcrunch Europe readers. You can grab one here on a first-come-first-serve basis.
Despite still being in private alpha (a beta should launch soon), Wozaik has garnered some early attention in the French startup scene after becoming the the winners of Mini Seedcamp Paris 2009, where they first demoed their product.
[Italy] Facebook has opened a commercial office in Italy to capitalise on the social network’s growth there. The news was picked up by major italian publications, and it may have a significant impact on the ecosystem here in Milan, even if it’s only a sales and business development office.
Of course Milan, as a the commercial centre for Italy, is a no-brainer to start an ad-sales office. However, it does mean it won’t be plugging in much to the startup scene which is largely centred around Rome, where it’s cheaper to operate from.
[UK] London-based Kohive, a startup in the collaboration space, has announced the launch of its premium services. This will be of interest to its users – however it’s not clear if it’s being used that much. Most of the people tweeting about it are trying to win an iPod touch in their promotion. Usually startups launch premium services when they have lots of users of their free version. However, admittedly there’s no reason not to create a premium version.
Kohive is an online collaboration platform with a desktop-like interface. There’s a dock of applications on the left and a tab panel at the bottom. Each of these tabs, or “hives” as they call them, provides a completely separate space from which to invite people, share content and communicate with them live. The first impression you’ll get when using the app is that the user interface and experience is very slick. I’ve embedded below a video that shows how the app works.
Italy, like a few other European countries, is way behind in the construction and creation of a “tech startup scene”. That being said, as of last Saturday there was almost no scene in Italy. Not because we lack the actual people, but because we do lack the sense of community and cluster of a place like, for instance London or Berlin.
There are different explanations for this.
The FIEG, an association of Italian editors, recently tried to sue Google’s News service. They claim: “Google is preventing editors from choosing freely which articles should be posted on the website”.
The editors are also claiming that websites which don’t want to be published on Google News would also be automatically excluded from Google’s standard search results.
Italian antitrust authorities have started investigating Google Italy on the basis of “predominant position abuse” and will publish the results of their research and findings on October 15th 2010.
Google Italy didn’t take that long to reply. Here is their official response from Josh Cohen, business product manager for Google News, which makes perfect sense to me: Read More
High-Tech Gründerfonds and DuMont Venture has joined existing investors Draper Investment Company and the Business Angel Peter Schüpbach in a new round of financing for Plista. The deal is rumored to be in the low seven figures.
Today Plista also rolled out OnSite Recommendations, its B2B operations providing businesses with the ability to target their content, products and advertisement more efficiently. The major market will be represented by site operators in the fields of content and e-commerce.
Scoreloop has just announced it closed its second financing round, with a $2.8 million / €2 million cash injection from new investors Earlybird and existing investor Target Partners, which was the seed funder for the Munich-based company. The funds will be used to fuel the growth of the company and to establish (or solidify) its position, especially in the realm of the iPhone. Since launching its technology in May 2009, Scoreloop has over 500 registered game developers that have published more than 40 Scoreloop enabled games in the iPhone App Store.
So one month after the release of its community application Scoreloop finds a great validation for its product, while Earlybird gets in on one of the most interesting new business areas around.
Online TV startup Konbini just raised €3M in its second round of founding from NextStage, one of the most active French venture capital firms (NextStage manages a €220m fund). The startup, which already raised €700k in the occasion of its launch in october 2008, aims at a younger internet generation which likes producing and broadcasting videos. The final objective of the company is to become a big player for video content in the 15-35 years old category, between YouTube, Hulu and HBO Premium.
Konbini will open an office in London before the end of the year and hopes to expand to the US too.
The French startup is trying to build a product and user-base aimed at advertisers who want to move budget from traditional TV to the web. They’ve developed a proprietary advertisement platform/format for this purpose.
“We have decided to capitalize on creativity, this second round of funding confirms our model oriented to production and broadcasting for a large audience of internet users. NextStage’s experience will give us all the means to finish the development and reach profitability in the short term,” says Konbini’s founders Lucie Beudet and David Creuzot. Konbini employs 10 people, reaches 300,000 unique visitors per month and is aiming at a million before the end of the year.
Online password management startup Passpack, announced it’s follow-on funding. The company raised €350,000 in June 2008 and now previous investor Zernike Meta Ventures is topping that with additional €74,000.
This new capital injection will enable the company to finish the development of their product and start to actively market it. They blog about it here.
The Rome-based company is not looking for full blown venture capital until it hits profitability. Apparently, the new round was determined by reaching a major milestone in development and user-base.
Fact: cash is very hard to get for Italian startups. This has been the major problem of the Italian innovation ecosystem since the dawn of time, there simply isn’t money. Investors prefer to rely on non-risky businesses such as constructions, pharmaceutical and clothing.
Web startups are facing a real hard time, but there might be hope. We already reported Google’s Italy country manager resignation to create a Venture Capital fund, but now there is a a new €55 Millions fund for startups.
It’s not generally well known, but there is a large Italian-expat community in Silicon Valley. A lot of first-time entrepreneurs decided to move there for all the obvious reasons and the lack of opportunity in Italy. But, luckily, there is a section of that diaspora that has not forgotten those they left behind. Some of them are trying to help Italian startups move to the Valley and thus gain a global perspective and a cycle of companies coming back and forth.
One of the most interesting initiatives is the Mind The Bridge foundation. It is a non profit association, founded by Marco Marinucci, a senior executive at Google, and Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol. Among all their activities one of the most interesting is the Business Plan competition they hold every year. The winners get mentoring and possibly a chance at a 3 month incubation in San Francisco’s Plug&Play Tech Center.
The deadline for applications is set on August 25th, finalists will be announced in September and winners will have the opportunity to fly to the Valley between December and April. Previous winners of the event include Zooppa, Eris4, and Econoetica.
It looks like a pretty unique opportunity to get a grasp of the Valley’s spirit and try to bring it back in Europe – possibly with some fresh capital in hand…
Italian internet giant Dada.net has acquired 51% of the assets of online gaming startup Fueps in a deal worth €1.36 Millions. Fueps launched in 2008 and grossed over €600k while total ebitda was €750,000 in the red. Seems more of a rescue than an acquisition to me.
Dada decided to take over the 51% stake of the company that belonged to RCS Digital. The other 49% is owned by Digital Bros group.
Fueps develops online gaming channels, and is planning a new online poker game. It has a catalog of over 100 games and a half-a-million community of gamers. A big part of the business consists in developing white label solutions for third parties such as Virgilio.it.
Dada Group is likely to continue its moves into the casual & skill games market, married to Fueps tech platform.
Dada.net one of the few internet companies listed on the Italian stock exchange. Dada is also one of the most acquisitive companies, buying Blogo.it, the biggest Italian blogging network.
Chiara Cicenia and Dejan Strbac, two MSc students of Politecnico di Milano in Italy wanted to give some advice to big companies about their products, marketing strategies and operations, but couldn’t find an easy way to do it. So they created Aleveo, designed along the principles of the good old-fashioned suggestion box.
Similar in principle to Uservoice, Get Satisfaction and other consumer feedback services, Aleveo’s USP is that its user base is restricted to students.
The model assumes that students posting ideas and feedback to companies will be talent-spotted by recruiters, or at the very least be able to take credit for successful ideas in their CV. Companies get fresh, new and most of all free ideas.
As a student-centric service, their product is free for students and companies to use. Companies and small teams can use the tool for soliciting and evaluating internal ideas, receive external ones on defined tags.
The model is however a classic freemium with other two plans available. With the “supporter” plan companies will be able to post “public challenges” for USD30/month, while for USD 100/month you can become an official sponsor of the project (as well as getting everything in the other plans).
Dejan Strbac says the research he and Chiaria conducted in setting up Aleveo indicates a strong presence of discrimination in organizations against students. The hope is that the platform will allow students to narrow the gap between the expectations of skills between the worlds of education and work.
What I see in the future of this project is a merit-based job-marketplace, with students competing for jobs through their ideas.
The guys are really aiming high, but we’re still not sure if they will go for the corporate route or keep small businesses in the game.
