“What starts today is an important initiative: for the young people who will work on the challenges, for the partners who have launched them and for our territory: there is an opportunity to build truly special companies, in Europe, and also in Italy and Turin, ”said John Elkann, president and CEO of Exor, speaking at the inauguration of Vento.
Vento (Venture Originator) is the new venture building program supported by Exor as part of its ESG policies, officially started today with an event in the spaces of the Talent Garden Fondazione Agnelli in Turin. Davide Dattoli’s company is one of the partners, together with OGR Torino and Compagnia di San Paolo. It is inspired by the venture builder models that are emerging in the United States and Europe, but it does not foresee equity acquisitions of the startups created, nor? success fee of any kind: it is completely non-profit.
The selection
“After many months of distancing, interacting in person, every day, until June will be an important factor: I have full confidence that the work of the 30 guys selected by Vento will be able to positively surprise us”, concluded Elkann.
Hundreds of applicants have put their business skills to the test to be admitted to the program. After motivational, cognitive, psycho-aptitude tests, interviews and a five-day field trial, 30 people were selected. The average age of the pioneers of this first edition of Vento is around 28 years old, but there are also those who are 45. Most of them are Italians, even if there are those who have packed their bags and decided to participate starting from Germany, Austria and the United States to spend the next few months in Turin. The profiles are divided between Biz Wiz (with a more business-oriented background) and Tech Nerd (experts in one or more technologies).
Path
Until June, aspiring entrepreneurs will be engaged in a path that will see them engaged in the development of a business idea. They will work within the spaces of the OGR Tech Startup Village in Turin and will be paid for their full time commitment. Divided into ten teams of three members, they will have to respond to challenges launched by large companies such as Reale Group, Reply, Telepass and UniCredit, with one goal: to find a solution that can be transformed into a business with high growth potential.
The path will be divided into three phases. The first, lasting two weeks, will be dedicated to investigating the problem. The second will focus on choosing the best solution and will last six weeks. Finally, the last part of the program – eight weeks – will be dedicated to the implementation of the solution and to the preparation for Investor Day, the day in which each team will be asked to tell about their startup to a group of investors with the aim of collecting the first capital on the market.
The appointment is for June 13, in the presence of investors from Italy, but also from the rest of Europe and Silicon Valley. On this occasion, the teams will have the opportunity to win a total of 250,000 euros in grants made available by the Compagnia di San Paolo to accelerate the growth of new products or services on the market.
The challenges
The challenges that the ten teams will have to face were illustrated by the representatives of the Partner Companies in the presence of John Elkann (Chairman and CEO of Exor), Davide Dattoli (Founder and Executive Chairman of Talent Garden), as well as, on video, Massimo Lapucci (General Secretary of the CRT Foundation and CEO of OGR Torino), and Carla Patrizia Ferrari (CFO of Compagnia di San Paolo). For Vento’s partner companies, Pietro Campagna (Global Head Working Capital Solutions in UniCredit), Marco Milan (FinTech Innovation Specialist in Reale Group), Francesco Signoretti (Innovation Senior Advisor of Telepass), Paolo Capitelli (Director Communities of Practices of Reply) intervened. ) and Noam Ohana (Managing Director of Exor Seeds). The themes are ambitious: making health services more accessible, reducing the environmental impact of coding, exploiting satellite data for new commercial uses, leveraging the inventory of small and medium-sized enterprises to increase access to credit. Other teams will work on topics such as simplifying residential rentals, digitizing the customer experience for financial services and optimizing the delivery of artificial intelligence algorithms.