The innovation of Made in Italy around Europe in search of new partnerships and opportunities. After Berlin and Paris, the innovative Italian startups selected by Smau, the business matching platform that has supported business innovation for 50 years, have arrived in London for “Italy RestartsUp in London”, a 3-day networking and meetings with companies , British institutions and innovators promoted by Smau with Ita, Italian Trade Agency. 37 startups have been chosen for the English stage, which also saw the presence of large Italian companies such as A2A, Angelini Consumer, Edison, Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center, Siram Veolia, Sky and Snam that arrived in London in looking for new partnerships on the Open Innovation front. With them also the hubs and accelerators of the Lazio, Emilia Romagna, Campania and Marche regions.
London is a must for internationalization
But the real protagonists are the startuppers, the young (and not only) Italian entrepreneurs who, thanks to digital and artificial intelligence, are ready to innovate the agri-food, green energy, manufacturing and service sectors. And for those looking to internationalization, London is an almost obligatory stop: according to Smau, the English capital is in fact a privileged destination for those who want to innovate not only in the Fintech field (the City has 2,183 companies in the sector), but also in Artificial Intelligence, Healthcare and EdTech. According to Startup Genome, which every year monitors the global evolution of startup ecosystems and calculates the overall value of investments in the sector, London is in second place in the global ranking of Global Startup Ecosystems, after Silicon Valley, on a par with New York, followed by Beijing and Boston. Its startup ecosystem, says Smau, is worth 142 billion dollars (that of Silicon Valley alone is worth 1.029 billion dollars) and is in third place, after the United States and China for the ability to attract venture capital investments. .
From AI for food and wine to electronic noses
The startups present in London come from all over Italy with their hi-tech ideas. Among the 37 choices by Smau there is, for example, Weart, born in Siena and also based in Milan, which presents TouchDIVER, a device that is worn on the fingertips and which allows for highly immersive virtual experiences: it reproduces with high fidelity the sensation of touching surfaces and simultaneously provides strength, temperature and feedback on the texture of the objects. Then Esgeo, the integrated sustainable intelligence platform founded by the manager Fabrizio Fiocchi with the Techedge Group to measure, manage and plan the impacts on the environment, society and governance, which was awarded by the British Consulate General.
On the agri-food front there is Enismaro, a Salerno-based company that has created a platform to guarantee, in an objective, unambiguous and transparent way, compliance with the quality characteristics of food and wine products throughout the production chain. The solution enhanced by two technological components, IoT sensors and Blockchain, allows to trace the place of origin of the product in every single phase of the supply chain. Again for the protection of consumers, the startup Farzati Tech has instead developed innovative traceability systems for the agri-food chain: the leading technology, BluDev®, is a system which, through the acquisition of the chemical matrix of an organic element, is able to define the Digital Bio Finger Print, a digital imprint that allows traceability of a certain origin to a finished product, a raw material or a semi-finished product, guaranteeing safety, transparency and awareness from the field to the table.
The Mastersense “electronic nose” is an easy-to-use device that does not require qualified personnel and meets the consumer’s need to be informed about the freshness of the food he is about to buy or consume. And again, The Thinking Clouds is an innovative start-up from Benevento that creates multimedia content through artificial intelligence platforms, creating engaging and personalized conversational experiences useful, for example, in tourism, cultural heritage, but also in e-learning. Then there is Pigro, with its tool that finds the correct content within the company knowledge base and extracts a precise and timely answer, used, for example, in customer care.