We have not often dealt with Italian startups in this Almanac, but today we have the opportunity: on September 15, 2009 Gioco Digitale is bought by Bwin for an (unofficial) figure of 115 million euros that go to the 3 founders: Carlo D’Acunto, Carlo Gualandri and Fausto Gismondi.
It may seem that there is little innovation in a platform for online games and in its sale and instead it is an exemplary story, and rare in our part, of how to make a startup, of how to make it grow in a very short time (3 years just, in this case), to then sell it and maybe leave again (Carlo Gualandri in London founded Soldo, which today has a rating around that of unicorns, Champions League startups).
Gioco Digitale was founded in 2006: how and why it was told a few years later by the founders. The background is even in 1996, when Carlo D’Acunto (Roman, with a degree in Electronic Engineering) joins the team of Telecom Italia which is to give birth to tin.it, the Internet service provider of Telecom. Here he meets Gualandri, who was one of the founders of Matrix, the startup that at the time had allied itself with Telecom to give birth to the Virgil portal, a big thing at the time. Years pass and in 2006 D’Acunto and Gualandri are together in Lottomatica where they are developing the online scratch card when a decree that liberalizes the game, establishing the rules. The two know they are quite good at developing digital services, leave Lottomatica and found Gioco Digitale with Fausto Gimondi. Having obtained the license they decide to bet on poker, becoming the first legal operator, and on online Bingo.
Things must have gone pretty well, because on September 15, 2009 they sold everything. In a country like ours, where startups are weak, sometimes provincial or improvised, almost always under-funded and undervalued, the case of Gioco Digitale remains a textbook.
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