One million euros for clean air. The startup Wiseair collected so much, 7 months after the end of the Techstars acceleration program. The round that closed yesterday sees Novum Capital Partners, a Swiss multi-family office, as lead investor.
Who I am
For Italian Tech, Wiseair is a well-known name: the Milanese startup had participated in the 2019 edition of the Italian Tech Week, just a few months after the official start of the project, and also in the last one, that of 2021, where the CEO and co-founder Paolo Barbato.
The belief behind Wiseair is simple: “A problem you cannot measure is a problem you cannot solve”. Born from the intuition of four engineers from the Politecnico di Milano, it works alongside municipalities, citizens and companies with the mission of restoring and maintaining clean air in cities. The company markets an environmental monitoring platform with sensors contained in plant pot-like devices that provide real-time data and insights into air quality. The information, collected and processed, can be viewed through an app for Android or iPhone, but above all on a console designed especially for public administrations.
For the PA
“At Wiseair we believe that the main stakeholders of a company with our vision are citizens and public administrations”, comments Barbato. “We work today with about forty municipalities throughout the Italian territory, we want to reach 400 by the end of next year”; adds Carlo Alberto Gaetaniello, cofounder and Coo of Wiseair.
“In big cities, dialogue with the administration is slow, so we often start with the citizens and install sensors on the balconies of private individuals who ask for it,” says Gaetaniello. Anyone who so wishes becomes an “Ambassador”, that is, he becomes the spokesperson and representative of the needs of a group of people who consider it useful to monitor air quality. The result is a community that initiates a dialogue with local authorities because a common good such as health must be protected and defended by the public administration and not only by individuals, however willing and active they may be. Among the Italian municipalities where the process is progressing faster is Turin, with the Torino City Lab, but Wiseair’s ambition is to go beyond Italy and aim for Europe, starting as early as 2023.
The next steps
“We have decided to focus on Wiseair to combine 5G with the cleantech challenge and to support this new and important milestone for the growth of the company”, comments Davide Rota, President and CEO of Linkem: the company was the first to invest in Wiseair, with 200 thousand euros in 2020.
“In 2021 we created all the conditions to be able to grow and we started to do so, moving from a group of 4 co-founders to a team of over 15 members in the Sales, Customer Success, Product and Tech areas. This investment will allow us to sustain this growth in 2022, bringing new talents on board, consolidating ourselves in the B2G environmental monitoring market and catalyzing the excellent results we have already been achieving for several months ”, continues Barbato.
Martin Olczyk, CEO of Techstars stresses that “with this investment, Wiseair will take a big step towards making our cities cleaner and more sustainable”. Also by opening a new product business line: no longer just for public administrations, but also to help companies reduce polluting emissions.
Fundamental to achieving these objectives will be investing in the growth of the team: applications for new positions are always open on the Wiseair website.
“Investors were inspired by the energy and enthusiasm of this team of Italian engineers united by a single vision: to have a positive environmental impact on the world and for the next generations”, comments Gabriele Gallotti, founding partner of Novum. “After all, the air we breathe is something great; and so is Wiseair. “
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