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Few but good, startups become big in Turin

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Few but good, startups become big in Turin

543 companies were registered in the register of startups and innovative companies in Turin in 2021. A positive figure, up by 18.3 percent compared to the previous year, and in line with the national increase. But it was not enough to prevent the Piedmontese capital from sliding to fourth place in the Italian ranking of cities with the most startups: first is Milan with 2600, second Rome, third Naples. And in the ranking of the Regions, Piedmont is sixth.

Yet Turin has a number of incubators, hubs and new business acceleration programs that are the envy of larger cities, and not only in Italy: around twenty are active today, while for example Monaco has 35 (for over 1800 startups, however ). In itself it would not be bad, on the contrary it would mean that in the face of a relatively limited number of companies that are born, they have more opportunities to find support and financing, and therefore to grow.

The record

Turin also has a world record: i3P, the Politecnico Incubator, is the best public incubator in the world, at the top of the World Rankings of Business Incubators and Accelerators 2019-2020. The report is drawn up by UBI Global, the most important international organization for evaluating incubation and acceleration programs linked to university institutions.

“We receive about 900 requests every year; ten percent pass a pre-selection and about half are actually incubated “; explains Adriano Marconetto, coach at i3P, where his latest creation, Anubi Digital, is based. Serial entrepreneur, with Vitaminic he anticipated the boom of online music in 1999, and since then he has not stopped building startups, opening up to the world but without leaving Turin. “There is a great deal of selection work, but today anyone who has a business idea can present it and it will be evaluated by a team of analysts: even if the answer is negative, there is always a profit, even if it is a suggestion on how to improve the project. It is something that a public entity can do, a social function that can hardly come from a private accelerator. On the other hand, here there is a bit of everything: fintech, hardware, digital, medical. Incubators, by their nature, support a wide range of companies, they are not vertical like accelerators “. In addition to i3P, there is another university incubator in Turin, 2i3T, and a third, Enne3, is in Novara.

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A singular case is that of Vento, the “Venture Originator” of Exor, which selected 30 aspiring entrepreneurs to face ten thematic challenges launched by large companies such as Reale Group, Reply, Telepass and UniCredit, with the aim of finding solutions that can become a business with a high growth potential. It does not provide for equity acquisitions of the startups created, nor success fees of any kind, but it is completely non-profit. Unlike Exor Seeds, which started last March, which is a project to grant loans to Italian startups in a simple and fast way: two weeks of analysis, 150 thousand euros, in exchange for a small share of the company. Scrolling the site, there are already dozens of companies that have benefited from it.

The possibilities

The Turin accelerators cover all imaginable businesses. There is Quickload, the € 10 million Italian acceleration program dedicated to European gaming startups, which arises from the joint effort of Microsoft, 34BigThings and OGR Torino. There are accelerators for smart cities (promoted by Compagnia di Sanpaolo, Fondazione Crt and Intesa Innovation Center), Big Data and social impact (Ogr Tech and Microsoft), 5G and Iot (Digital Magics). And mobility (Techstars), in memory of Turin’s great automotive tradition. There are two accelerators dedicated to social innovation, but also Metaverse 4 Finance Accelerator, recently launched by the Sella Group, the first Italian program dedicated to startups that develop solutions and technologies in the metaverse applied to finance.

And again: Takeoff, 21 million euros for startups dedicated to the aerospace and advanced hardware sectors; is an initiative of the promoters and investors CDP Venture Capital, which involves Plug and Play Tech Center and OGR Torino, Unione Industriali Torino and Gruppo Leonardo corporate partner. Also in the aerospace field, Neva Sgr, the venture capital tech of Intesa announced in February an agreement worth over a billion to bring D-Orbit to the Nasdaq: a startup so to speak, given that it employs 160 people and is able to produce 15 satellite carriers per year. The list is incomplete, but the geography is clear: the road to innovation in Turin passes through the Officine Grandi Riparazioni, where almost everyone has a headquarters or an office. And where the next edition of the Italian Tech Week will be held on 29 and 30 September.

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The numbers

In the first half of 2022, approximately 996 million euros were invested in startups in Italy, 30 percent more than in the same period of 2021, which closed with a total of 1.3 billion. Turin boasts the highest funding round: Newcleo’s 300 million Series A round, which builds next generation nuclear power plants; among the first to believe it, those of Liftt, who had invested a million just a year ago. And yet the average turnover of innovative companies in the Piedmontese capital is 133,000 euros, 26.9 percent less than the national average (182,000 euros). On the other hand, the age of startuppers, who often launch their companies after high-level professional paths, is higher: almost half have already held positions as director or manager, and in over 72 percent of cases they have gained previous entrepreneurial experience. . “On the one hand there are young graduates who, not finding a job, try to create it, on the other middle-aged professionals who try to change their careers, out of challenge or out of necessity”, Marconetto observes. “However, this is not necessarily a bad thing: according to some researches, the most successful startups are founded by people with some entrepreneurial experience behind them”. Other than California garages and college students in flip flops.

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