Sweetguest, a platform for managing short term accommodations, raised an 8 million euros round to invest in its organic development (see here a previous post by BeBeez). Indaco Venture Partners, Invitalia Ventures, and a pool of Italian angel investors poured resources in the company. Rocco Lomazzi,Edoardo Grattirola and Jacopo Vanetti (the founder of Jusp) created Sweetguest in 2016. In April 2018, Airbnb, the US short term accommodation giant, appointed Sweetguest as its first Italian Professional Co-Host partner.
In the last four months, Italian equity crowdfunding platform raised 15 million euros, 70 million since 2014, while fundraising in 2018 amounted to over 36 million, said Crowdfundingbuzz (see here a previous post by BeBeez). Mamacrowd hosted 53 equity crowdfunding campaigns for a fundraising of 20.7 million euros in 2017 and 5.6 million in 2019. CrowdFundMe hosted 49 campaigns for a 14.2 million worth fundraising in 2017 and 2.9 million in 2019. Platforms for real estate equity crowdfunding have achieved remarkable results. Walliance for example hosted 9 campaigns in the last two years and allowed to raise 9.9 million. Since 2018, Concrete hosted 2 campaigns for a fundraising of 1.75 million.
Banks and financial services companies increasingly group for implementing Distributed Ledger Technologies and blockchains on their operational business (see here a previous post by BeBeez). AbiLab, the research and innovation center of ABI, the Italian banks association, has carried on a new technical test for the blockchain project Spunta Project. The “spunta” is a procedure that checks the correspondence of the activities involving two different banks, for example operations carried out between two customers of two institutions, and concerns the reconciliation of flows and transactions that generate entries on the reciprocal accounts in Italy. The idea is bringing all those operations on a DLT register. The SPunta Project was announed in June 2018 with the partecipation of 14 banks (i.e. Banca Mediolanum, Mps, Banca Sella, Bnp Bnp Paribas, Banca Popolare di Sondrio, Banco Bpm, CheBanca!, Credito Emiliano, Crédit Agricole, Credito Valtellinese, Iccrea Banca, Intesa Sanpaolo, Nexi Banca, and Ubi). The project has then involved more and more banks and the group has now reached the number of 200 banks. Italian software and IT companies Ntt Data and Sia are supplying infrastructural services for Spunta Project.
Italian life sciences incubator Cube-Labs aims to close 20 spin-offs bioscience companies by the end of 2020 and 30 spin-offs by the end of 2023 (see here a previous post by BeBeez). Cube-Labs will raise capitals for startups through IPOs and club deals. Gruppo Surace founded the incubator in 2014. Cube-Labs holds 12 spin-offs in its portfolio and has a track record of 56 transactions.
