Wholly funded by Exor, we are Italy’s most active non-governmental early-stage fund. With our second fund, we are investing €75M to empower exceptional Italian founders globally. We are sector-agnostic and geography-independent. Beyond venture capital, we run two dedicated ecosystem initiatives. Venture Building is a 5-month intensive program designed to turn ambitious individuals into successful founders. We select participants who don’t yet have a team or an idea and help them find the right co-founders and real problems worth solving. The program runs once a year, from January to June, and requires full-time relocation to Turin. During the first 12 weeks, founders receive a €3,750 grant provided by Fondazione Compagnia di Sanpaolo. After that, we invest €80,000 for 10% equity in the most promising teams. Italian Tech Week is one of Europe’s most influential tech gatherings, bringing together 15,000+ attendees from over 50 countries in 2024. It features exclusive discussions with top tech leaders and visionaries, curated masterclasses led by successful founders and operators, engaging side events across Turin, and a networking platform designed to create meaningful connections. Listen to Vento Meets, our podcast > https://open.spotify.com/show/7vN0sSAO8P1p0c7GIluSAD?si=NMFYmIcES4GeDSOUX9welw
Link esterno per Vento
Corso Castelfidardo, 22
Turin, Piedmont 10128, IT
Agenda update 👇
We're thrilled to announce that Nik Storonsky, Founder and CEO of Revolut, Europe's most valuable private technology company, will join John Elkann for a fireside chat on the main stage of Wave. 🗓️ 9 October, 12:00 📍 OGR Torino 🎟️ Get your pass here: https://lnkd.in/d8DnQV9R
What a (first half of) year, this 2026. The Vento rebrand, the launch of a new edition of Wave by Vento (formerly Italian Tech Week), a new Reef cohort that has already produced promising startups. But the heart of what we do at Vento, the thing that drives everything, is the incredible companies we meet along the way and have the fortune to invest in. Not just a lot of new deals, but also plenty of great news from our portfolio, which now counts more than 190 companies based all over the world. We also celebrated Lexroom, closing a $50M Series B, Pillar and Seltz raising respectively €12M and €12.5M seed rounds. We organised meetups between Zurich and Barcelona where we met a lot of incredible Italian founders and we can't wait to tell you more about all the new startups that have joined us over the past six months. Follow us to stay updated on our portfolio, and if you have an incredible startup with at least one Italian on the founding team, based anywhere in the world, reach out.
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Building an AI talent ecosystem in the EU is no longer a plan. And the breakdown by city tells a more specific story. → Paris leads the continent in AI job posting volume, across a wide range of occupations. → Dublin is one of the EU's largest and most consistent AI hiring hubs, combining technical, operational, and infrastructure roles. → Munich is concentrating on Forward-Deployed Engineers. → Milan is building depth in Data Annotators and Prompt Engineers. → Madrid is the fastest-growing city for AI talent in the EU, up 6x since 2023. Berlin is hiring primarily for technical roles. → Warsaw is emerging fast as an AI Engineering hub, up 5x since 2023. Most growth is being driven by data annotators, but AI engineering and AI infrastructure roles are climbing alongside them. Source: LinkedIn's EU Labor Market report, "Unlocking Competitiveness in the Age of AI."
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The program officially ended on July 3rd, and if I'm being honest, this is the hardest part. The OGR empties out, no one knocks on the office door anymore, and the energy that filled these rooms for months just… isn't there in the same way. A few months ago, we told this cohort something we truly believe: "Venture building" was technical, but it missed the magic. Because what happens in these rooms isn't just building startups. It's people, from different worlds, who meet at the right moment, who bring different skills, different backgrounds, different energy, and become something bigger together. That's a Reef: an environment where radical builders find shelter and strength, where talent converges to form teams, and where ideas take root and grow into companies capable of navigating the open sea. Growth that doesn't happen in isolation, but through connection. Where diversity isn't a nice-to-have, it's the core mechanism. So we became Reef by Vento. And this cohort is proof of exactly that. A group of individuals who walked in not really knowing each other, and walked out as teams. As founders. As friends, honestly, you can see it in the second photo. If you ask me what I've learned from them, it's hard to pick just one thing. I've learned that conviction can be built quietly, one hard conversation at a time. I've learned that the best ideas rarely survive first contact with reality, and that the founders who make it aren't the ones with the perfect plan, but the ones who keep showing up after the plan breaks. I've learned more about resilience, curiosity, and honesty from watching them work than from anything I could have taught them. And I've learned that we're heading in the right direction. Finding the right team, the right co-founder, isn't a given... it doesn't always happen. But when it doesn't, something else does: the people who didn't end up building their own startup are, today, working in our portfolio companies. That's not a side effect; that's exactly the network Reef is meant to create. So, thank you, guys. For trusting us with your time, your ideas, and your uncertainty, in the moments when you had more questions than answers. It was a privilege to be in the room. And thank you, Marco the best possible partner to build this with. None of this would be the same without you. Five years. 190 people. One reef, still growing. If you want to be part of the next one, the waitlist for next year's program is open: https://lnkd.in/eFY26FS9
Satellites are pushing further, staying up longer, and doing more, but most are still stuck running on the power they launched with. ORiS - Orbital Recharge in Space has secured €5 million in total funding: a €4.5 million pre-seed round led by Earlybird Venture Capital and co-led by Pitchdrive, with participation from Galaxia | Polo Nazionale di Trasferimento Tecnologico dell'Aerospazio, Piemonte Next Fund and us, alongside a €0.5 million non-dilutive grant from a Piedmont Region's programme. Founded by four Politecnico di Torino engineers (Andrea Villa, Anna Mauro, Domenico Edoardo Sfasciamuro and Francesco Lopez) ORiS is building an in-orbit energy distribution grid: laser-based wireless power transmission that lets satellites recharge directly in orbit, extend their missions, and keep operating through eclipse periods instead of running dark. Proud to back a Italian team building the infrastructure the next space economy will run on. Onward and upward, ORiS 🚀
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We know Italy has talent. And sometimes, that talent crosses borders. This Tuesday, Marco Venturini, some of Reef's founders (Matteo, Fernanda, Enrico, Giuseppe), and I traveled to Berlin, where, together with Angel Invest, we hosted an aperitivo (of course 🍝) for Italian aspiring entrepreneurs living abroad. We arrived with a conviction and left with it strengthened: Italian talent is everywhere, and it's hungry to build. What struck me most wasn't just the quality of the conversations, it was watching people click on the spot. Some attendees are already collaborating with each other, just days later. This is exactly what we believe in at Reef: grit and passion matter more than having the perfect idea. And sometimes, you need to go where the talent is, that's why we created the "Reef goes to" series. Thank you to Angel Invest for partnering with us and to everyone who showed up and made the evening special. Berlin was the first stop. See you at the next one! 👋
Most surgical teams walk out of the operating room with no structured way to learn from what just happened. The knowledge lives in memory, if it lives anywhere at all. We're excited to welcome Scialytics to our portfolio. They're building AI that makes surgery safer by turning surgical video into practical support for teams before, during, and after an operation: understanding what happened, identifying risk and variation, and bringing proven best practices into the operating room. It's a new paradigm for quality assurance in surgery: every operation generating insight, and every insight making the next operation safer. Excited to back the Scialytics team. 🌱 Pietro Mascagni, Deepak Alapatt, Luca Sestini
Falling sick while traveling usually means one thing: scrambling in a language you don't speak, with no idea which doctor to trust. Doctorsa has already solved that for over 250,000 travelers, connecting them to a network of 550 vetted doctors across 40 countries, with a video consult ready in about 5 minutes and no subscription required. And now Doctorsa has just closed a €1M round led by PranaVentures, with 40Jemz Ventures and us also participating. Launched in Italy in 2023 by Nadia Neytcheva and Francesco Maria Serino, the platform is now rolling out Agentic Booking, letting users request and book a medical consultation directly through their AI assistant, while staying fully in control of the final decision. The new capital will fund international expansion, with a strong focus on the US, and the launch of a B2B offering for travel operators, insurers, and corporate wellness programs. Congrats to the whole Doctorsa team 🌍
Believing in what you're building is the easy part. Saying it out loud "we're the best, we're going to raise billions" is where it gets uncomfortable. One of our founders in residence at Reef is honest about it: the performance of pitching can feel forced, even a little absurd. But investors aren't in the room for the modest version of the truth. They're there to see whether you can turn quiet confidence into conviction people can feel. That translation is the real skill. Watch the Vento Meets episodes at the link here 🎥 https://lnkd.in/eUYke8gZ 🎙️https://lnkd.in/eV-by_Vb
Six months to €1M ARR, top 5% of B2B SaaS startups globally and they're hiring! Have a look > https://lnkd.in/dPrZXYcc Congrats to Andrea and Matteo, proud doesn't cover it.
Cato is in the top 5% of B2B SaaS startups globally. As it took us 6 months to reach €1M ARR 🔥 Sure, as explained before, we already had a handful of testers in late ‘25. But those were mostly pilots, contracts still to go live and monthly rather than yearly contracts 😉 Anyway, details aside, we grew twice as fast we thought just a few months ago. As I told my team the other day, today we can walk holding our heads high. Tomorrow, we should stress over the next milestone. Want to help us get from 1 to 10 now? Open vacancies in the comments, together with this week’s newsletter, obviously ➡️