Italian challenger bank Hype received the Imel (electronic money institutions) authorization from Banca d’Italia for operating as electronic money operator (see here a previous post by BeBeez. From June 2020, the challenger bank will be able to give its clients a European Iban code and offer loans and investment services. Antonio Valitutti is the ceo of Hype, which received the support of SellaLab, a subsidiary of Banca Sella. Hype is currently part of Fabrick, the open banking platform of which Banca Sella is a controlling shareholder.
Salvatore Milanese, the founder of restructuring advisory firm Pantalica Partners Holding, said to BeBeez that he founded Brazil-based fintech startups Money Money Invest, a lender to small companies, and InMano, a lender for unrated blacklisted individuals that cannot access banking credit (see here a previous post by BeBeez). A Milanese owns 20% of Money Money and 20% of InMano. Local entrepreneurs and the company’s management own the remaining stake in the company.
Minsait, a subsidiary of Spain’s Indra, launched TAPP, a solution for withdrawing without touching ATM machines, for the Italian market (see here a previous post by BeBeez). TAPP also allows to buy foreign currency and to execute the payment of pensions, social security benefits, grants, microloans, or money wires. Davide Celli is Minsait’s Italian head for the bank and insurance sector. Indra is a Madrid-listed IT consultancy firm that has a turnover of 3.2 billion euros.
Massimo Volpe, Antonio Ragusa and Paolo Intermite launched Retail Hub, an accelerator for the retail sector that is looking for new partners (see here a previous post by BeBeez). The company aims to raise 200k euros on the ground of a pre-money value of 13 million euros. Italian entrepreneurs Luciano Cimmino, Denis Moro and other participants to the retail sector poured resources in Retail Hub. Sources said to BeBeez that the company aims to sign a commitment with market participants further to raise funds. Retail Hub aims to scale-up in 18 months in Europe for attracting overseas investors. The accelerator has hubs in London, Milan and New York and aims to focus on the sectors of innovative payments, post-sales strategies, check-out systems, big and small data analysis, in-shop strategy, supply chains, retail strategy for social networks, e-commerce, visual commerce, drive to store strategy, and voice commerce. Retail Hub already collaborated with Fluida, a cloud platform for Employee Relationship Management, of which Zucchetti acquired 51% in September 2019. Retail Hub also collaborated with Martha’s Cottage, an e-commerce platform for wedding products that in February 2019 raised 0.520 million.
Italian investor in startups Liftt raised 7.2 million euros (see here a previous post by BeBeez). Liftt attracted the resources of private investors, business angels, financial holdings and the company’s workers. Liftt supports the startups with financial resources for all the financing stages (seed, start-up and early growth) and coaching programmes for management. By the end of 2020, the company aims to raise 6 million euros for a total invested capital of 15 million. In 2020-2024, Liftt aims to support startups with cumulated investments of 90 million and co-investments of about 450 million. Stefano Buono is the chairman of Liftt and previously founded Advanced Accelerator Applications, an asset that Novartis acquired for 3.9 billion Dollars in 2018. Buono is also the owner of the family office Elysia Capital. Carla Ferrari, the cfo of Compagnia di San Paolo, is a board member of Liftt. Compagnia di San Paolo and Turin Polytechnic University founded Liftt.
Bocconi for Innovation (B4i), the Bocconi University’s platform for pre-acceleration, acceleration and internal development of startups, shortlisted 5 companies (instead of 10 as the company planned in November 2019) out of 200 applications (See here a previous post by BeBeez). The winners received 30,000 euros each and will get support for the acceleration process.vThe awarded companies are:
- Doctors in Italy, a provider of medical assistance to foreign tourists in Italy that developed Tivisito.it during the Covid-19 emergency (digital tech area);
- Duing, an online recruiting platform (digital tech area);
- Endelea, an e-commerce platform for European design clothes with African fabrics (sustainability area);
- ViaMadeinItaly, a platform for supporting artisans for retail sales (food, fashion, furniture and manufacturing area);
- Qi4M, an Artificial Intelligence-based support for companies’ investment decisions (digital tech area).
At the end of the 4 months acceleration programme, B4i will allow the shortlisted startups to liaise with angel investors and venture capital funds for reaching the next development stage. Markus Venzin is Bocconi University’s Pro-Rector for Innovation. Nico Valenti Gatto, is the coo of B4i – Bocconi for Innovation.
Swiss ArtID launched its first STO (Securities Token Offering) for raising up to 5 million euros on Luxembourg blockchain-based platform Stokr (see here a previous post by BeBeez). Lugano da Stefano Vablais (ceo) and Luca Muttoni founded ArtID in 2016. Since June 2018, the company’s audits the authenticity of art items. The Stockr platform allows placing digital securities issued through tokens that identify shares of the issuer and give the right to get shares of revenues or of profits in accordance with a smart contract connected to the token and paid through an account on French Lemonway which also supports many crowdfunding lending platforms.
INGO, a provider of CRM solutions, paid 4.7 million euros for acquiring Xenialab, a spin-off of Turin Polytechnic University that developed the omnichannel platform XCALLY Motion (see here a previous post by BeBeez). Banco Bpm supported the transaction. Diego Gosmar (ceo of Xenialab) will be the new Head of International Operations, Giuseppe Innamorato the CTO of the group. Xenialab, born in 2007, has sales of 2.67 million, an ebitda of 0.885 million and net cash of 0.413 million. Marco Durante is the ceo of INGO. Giuseppe Scellato is the chairman of I3P that provided incubation support to 255 companies in the last 20 years and received the award UBI Global World Rankings of Business Incubators and Accelerators 2019 – 2020 at the World Summit for incubation in 2019, held on 6 November 2019 in Doha at the Qatar Development Bank
