The Week in Italian Startup

Italian biotech and medtech led the week: MMI raised a $125M Series D from BioStar Capital, S3 Ventures and Angelini Ventures, and Aptadir Therapeutics raised a €40M seed backed by CDP Venture Capital, Angelini and Italy's biotech angel clubs. MMI's Symani robot filters tremor and scales a surgeon's movements down, making super-microsurgery below 1mm possible, with about 50 installed systems and 3,500 procedures worldwide. We discuss why medtech needs patient capital, and why MMI is now at the moment where the market decides whether the technology scales. MMI was born in Italy and does most of its R&D there while raising in the US, a dual-entity model that is common in biotech for a good reason. Aptadir works on how the cell reads its genes, targeting DNA methylation to reactivate silenced genes rather than editing DNA, and its €40M seed is a reminder that biotech was raising huge seed rounds long before AI. Then Netsec's $10M Series A, which brings IT management and security under one roof, with AI automating the routine L0 and L1 tickets (Niccolò is an investor). We close on why "AI-native" has become the new "cloud-based", no longer a value proposition, and why anything compliance is ripe for AI agents working alongside human experts.

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Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomollo
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Newcleo went public on Nasdaq via a SPAC merger with NewHold on September 22, raising $247M — but only $31M came from the SPAC's roughly $209M trust account, and $216M came from the PIPE. The press read the debut as bumpy, pointing at a -17% move at the open; we explain why that misreads how SPACs work. A SPAC is a listed cash box that raises money before it has a business, and its shareholders can redeem their shares before the merger closes — on average around 50% of them do. Many enter planning to leave at the listing: they earn T-bill interest on the trust and keep warrants to buy shares later at a fixed price, often $11.50. The PIPE is different: new investors committed at $10 a share with no redemption right, which makes it the real signal of confidence in the deal. We also cover why Newcleo chose Nasdaq over Borsa Italiana, where a more risk-tolerant investor pool is used to financing cutting-edge technology that loses money for years, and why over $1B raised since 2021 is only the beginning next to a MOX fuel plant estimated at about $2.4B. Then Tundr's €11.6M Series A, with Crédit Agricole Italia and Sella Direct Ventures on a cap table that could become a distribution network, if it turns into commercial deals.

Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/
Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomollo

Listen to all episodes on audio:

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQ
Google Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RC
Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3Elhykq
Amazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9

Get in touch:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxx
Twitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomollo
Email: giacomo@in3.ventures

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Exein raised $270M at a $1.7B valuation — roughly €234m at about €1.45bn — making it Italy's newest unicorn in embedded IoT and firmware cybersecurity, with no Italian investor named in the round. We track the climb: a €70M Series C led by Balderton in July 2025 above €350M, then €100M in December 2025 split roughly half equity and half debt with the equity led by Blue Cloud Ventures near €700M, and now a round that doubles the price again. Niccolò Sanarico calls it what it is: an overnight success, ten years in the making. The product sits inside the firmware manufacturers ship — industrial machines, cameras, robots, budget Android phones — under an open-core model where chipmakers embed it free, paid conversion runs near 10%, and the unpaid majority becomes telemetry for a security foundation model trained on two years of data from more than two billion devices. The harder question is the capital: Italy started this company, United Ventures backed it first, and international investors made it a unicorn, because no fund in Italy writes a €200M check into a single startup. We go through the pool — Goldman Sachs, a telecom CVC, KfW, and the European Investment Bank through the European Tech Champions Initiative — and the EU Cyber Resilience Act, whose reporting obligations started September 11, 2026, one week before the announcement, with the main requirements from December 11, 2027. From there it's the Asian supply chain, where MediaTek chips put Exein into smart TVs, Wi-Fi routers, Chromebooks and voice assistants, and European regulation gets exported as demand into Asian manufacturing. We close on physical AI, where a compromised robot on a factory floor has a far wider blast radius than a compromised fridge, and on Primo Capital's new Primo Biotech Lazio fund for early-stage life sciences.

Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/
Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomollo

Listen to all episodes on audio:

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQ
Google Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RC
Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3Elhykq
Amazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9

Get in touch:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxx
Twitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomollo
Email: giacomo@in3.ventures

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Bending Spoons is buying Miro for $1.355B in enterprise value, all cash, roughly 90% below Miro's $17.5B valuation from January 2022, and some Miro shareholders are reinvesting $295M of their payout into newly issued Bending Spoons shares. Giacomo reads that as a hedge on Bending Spoons' operations; Niccolò Sanarico suggests it may simply have been a condition to close the deal. On paper Miro is a stellar business: about $600M in ARR, 250,000 organizations, around 90% of revenue from businesses and more than 750 customers paying over $100K a year, sold at roughly 2.3x ARR. We look at why Miro breaks Bending Spoons' nostalgia-brand pattern and how AI restructuring, with acquired products running on a shared stack for auth, payments, A/B testing, analytics and AI inference, makes the model work. The counterforce is that AI also shrinks the seats enterprise clients buy, and Niccolò argues these are times for building, not dismantling. Then the bigger question for European venture: is Europe's software edge consolidation rather than invention? We also cover Exein's $270M round at a $1.7B valuation as the EU Cyber Resilience Act's reporting obligations begin, and Cato's €6M seed for AI on public tenders.

Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/
Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomollo

Listen to all episodes on audio:

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQ
Google Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RC
Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3Elhykq
Amazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9

Get in touch:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxx
Twitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomollo
Email: giacomo@in3.ventures

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Domyn, Europe's largest AI round, is mostly debt: $1.1B raised, roughly 90% of it borrowed against 6,000 Nvidia chips in southern Italy, leaving an equity cheque of about $110M. That structure is the episode. A deal that began as a substantial Series A in 2024–25 became infrastructure financing, and Niccolò Sanarico's read is blunt: this is not pure-play venture capital, it is another beast. From there we split AI sovereignty into its real layers — where data sits, who controls the model, who operates the system, and who supplies replacement hardware — with Domyn as the hybrid case, training locally on a supply chain it does not own. We test the commercial question underneath: is there a market for companies that want their own model, fully localised, trained on proprietary data, and what does that cost you when a competitor runs on a frontier model instead. The OpenAI mathematics episode gets at why the demand exists anyway, because the doubt about data safety is enough. We also cover Tensive, an Italian biotech in biomaterials, which took €20M from the European Investment Bank as a convertible loan in two tranches on a 20-year maturity, roughly double the venture-debt horizon. And Foorban, the Milan food startup that reached operational break-even with more than 500 customers and 800 smart fridges, raising €7.2M from IMPACT Partners in a round that also bought out some existing shareholders.

Niccolò's newsletter: http://dealflowit.niccolosanarico.com/
Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@giacomomollo

Listen to all episodes on audio:

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3fVynsQ
Google Podcast: https://bit.ly/3thf9RC
Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3Elhykq
Amazon Music: https://shorturl.at/9Dtd9

Get in touch:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giacxxx
Twitter: https://twitter.com/giacomomollo
Email: giacomo@in3.ventures

#venturecapital #italy #startup