Italian Government promoted Fondo Italiano d’Investimento sgr (FII) announced yesterday its first four investments in venture capital veichles focused on Italian startup companies for a total consideration of 50 million euros (see here the press release).
The latter is actually the figure that the new fund of funds had raised already thanks to Cassa Depositi e Prestiti. More in detail, FII’s board voted an investement in the following projects: Caravella, Stark Ventures One, Primomiglio and Innogest Capital II.
As for the Caravella project, this is part of a co-investment agreement signed by FII and the European Invest Fund (EIF) last November in order to support the development of Italian small and medium-sized enterprises (see a previous post by BeBeez).
Back than FI’s chairman Innocenzo Cipolletta and ceo Gabriele Cappellini announced that FII would have invested part of its venture capital committment in a 30 million euros new veichle dedicated to seed capital which would have been set up by FII and EIF together in order to co-invest alongside selected business angels, in line with the European Angels Fund initiative already launched and implemented by EIF.
Stark Ventures One will instead invest in robotics/internet-of- things sectors, entreprise innovation (“big data”) and financial information technology and will be managed by an Italian managment company (sgr) which is going to be founded by da Franco BernabeÌ, Cesare Sironi and Marco Grillo.
Stark Ventures One is then the third startup accelerator that has been sponsored by FII, after Programma 101 (digital tech and ICT) and Panakes (biotech and medical devices).
Primomiglio will invest in startups active in the digital market and will be managed by Gianluca Dettori, Franco Gonella and Antonio Concolino who have been working together as the management team of the venture investment company dPixel, while Banca Sella Holding will act both as an investor in Primomiglio and as an operative partner.
Finally, Innogest Capital II fund is the second fund launched by Innogest sgr. Last November the venture capital firm announced the second closing of its fundraising to 70 million euros on a 60-80 million euros target and fundraising was expected to finally close by the end of February (see a previous post by BeBeez).
Thanks to these decisions of the board, FII’s committement to venture capital in Italy is now over 115 million euros, 65 millions of which had been already committed by the first FII fund and supported about 50 companies.
In the meantime FII’s ceo Gabriele Cappellini is still working on fundraising both for the venture capital funds of funds (the target is 100-150 million euros) and for the private debt funds of funds (the target is 500 millions and Cdp committed 250 million euros already, see here a previous post by BeBeez).
Finally, Cappellini is starting the fundraising of a new private equity fund, as the first one (vintage 2010 ) has almost entirely invested its 1.2 billion euros committed capital (both in direct investments and in private equity and venture capital funds).
