Italian tech’s midyear scorecard reads: a mixed bag. Deal count has risen year-over-year but funding amounts are low — there have only been 11 deals valued at €10m+ in 2025.
Last year, there were multiple hefty Italian raises, such as software unicorn Bending Spoons’s $155m round, space company D-Orbit’s $166m raise and surgical robot company Medical Microinstruments’s $110m raise.
Are Italians concerned by the lack of blockbuster deals in 2025? “For me, I don’t really pay attention to whether our H1 this year was higher than last year or not,” says Stefano Onofri, cofounder of Bologna-based Cubbit, which describes itself as the only data centre-less cloud provider in the EU.
“This is my main KPI: how many foreign investor-led rounds above €5m-8m are there? There’s a fairly positive trend here.”
Sifted counts seven foreign investor-led rounds since January, and data confirms more foreign investors overall are cutting Italian deals this year. In the first half of last year 207 investors backed Italian startups, of which 118 (or 57%) were Italian. So far this year, 380 investors have backed Italian startups, of which 151 are Italian (40%).
Cubbit last year raised $12.5m from London investors LocalGlobe and ETF Partners. “It was the very first time LocalGlobe invested in Italy. Guess what, one of the partners is Italian,” says Onofri. “The way you can build trust is if you have someone on the other end of the table who knows Italy.”
A recent foreign-led deal that has investors chatting is VC firm Creandum’s €12m investment in fintech Sibill, which aims to simplify financial and administrative workload for small businesses. “I’d never seen them lead a deal here,” says Niccolò Sanarico, partner at Milan-based Primo Capital. Interest from abroad has also reached his portfolio. “My companies are getting inbound calls from analysts at ‘tier one’ investors,” he says.
Jet HR’s big year
The biggest Italian deal of the year so far is the €25m raised by Milan-based HR and paywall platform Jet HR in June. “I wasn’t aware we were the highest,” says the company’s cofounder and CEO Marco Ogliengo.
He shares some perspective on how far tech has come in Italy. “When I started my first company [ProntoPro] in 2015, there were basically only three Italian funds. I used to joke that they would wait until post-IPO to send a term sheet. Now there’s more capital than good companies to invest in.”
He’s noticed a change in Italy’s VC scene even in the last two years. “When I raised my pre-seed for Jet HR in 2023, I talked to Italian and foreign funds. All the foreign funds ended up declining. Italy was this unknown thing to them. Our latest round was led by a US fund [Base10 Partners], this is a strong sign of change.
“Today it’s very easy to raise early-stage rounds in Italy. You even have American funds investing at this stage. That’s new,” he says. “But you’re still lacking in terms of [Series B+] growth capital.” Ogliengo is not the only founder in his home: his wife, Silvia Wang, is cofounder of Milan-based telehealth service Serenis, the country’s fastest-growing startup.
‘We had no competition’
The reasons that make Italy a hard place for startups to succeed are also advantages, says Ogliengo, with typical founder optimism.
“Everything that frustrates you is also an opportunity. Italy’s got a lot more bureaucracy than any country I know of.
“But in what other country in the world could you build a HR SaaS company from scratch with no competition? There was none. In the UK, it would’ve been us versus 10 companies. It’s an underexploited opportunity for Italians.”
Johan Brenner, a general partner at Creandum, led his firm’s investment in Sybill. He said there was a big opportunity in Italy because “it’s a market of 4m SMEs and they’re underserved: there’s a lot of clunky, legacy tech still being used by businesses.”
But where Italy is disadvantaged, compared to places like London, is its smaller pool of people with experience of big companies, Ogliengo says. “We don’t have much managerial talent and that’s a problem when you’re scaling and you need people who’ve been there and done that.”
Ogliengo knows he’d improve his recruitment options if Jet HR used English in the office. “But we need to speak the language of our customers,” he says. “Our thesis is a little controversial: we’re never going abroad, we want to build a huge single country company.”
Something else that’s holding Italian tech back is exit opportunities, which are slim right now, says Gianluca D’Agostino, managing partner of VC firm The Techshop in Milan. “The craziness of European corporates is not comparable with the craziness of American buyers,” he says. “When the exits finally come, Italy’s going to be right up there with the other European tech leaders.”
‘More blips on the radar’
Ogliengo is this year’s tech star, but there are other founders ready to burst out, says Sanarico. “I am kind of concerned about funding sizes but let me put it this way: we’re seeing more blips on the radar.
“There are companies being started by people who returned to Italy during the pandemic. I’m not expecting to see a new unicorn yet but the underlying assets are taking shape.” Sanarico also noted how the state investor, CDP Venture Capital, is doing a decent job at pumping more money into the tech scene. At this point last year, the fund had backed 19 deals; this year it’s 41.
D’Agostino is one of the Italians who moved home after 10 years living in London. “Every year since I’ve returned it’s been a little better, the quality of dealflow, of founders,” he says. “There are two deals we’re cooking and each company is run by three founders and every one of them has done an exit before. That’s pretty big.”
Italy’s smaller pool of capital is no excuse for startups, he adds. “There is such a thing as having too much money, look at that company in Paris. That much money from day one: not a good idea.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/italys-midyear-scorecard-deal-count-high-but-funding-low/
