In the latest ranking of the 50 best companies in the world of “Robotic process automation”, the American giant of research and technological consultancy Gartner indicates only one Italian: Firedesktop, a start-up born in Genoa in 2015 that grew with the help of a company venture capital venue, Ego Venture. It has 10 employees, but customers in industry, such as Fincantieri, and in finance, such as Mps. He designed and built a family of algorithms that work on unstructured data. Gianluca Rossi, founder and CEO of the start-up, explains: «Usually algorithms manage data pigeonholed in some database. Our people manage chaos ». They can compile a budget, solicit a client’s payment, make many decisions that have to do with bureaucracy faster and more objective. «It is no coincidence that all robotic process automation companies were born in Europe, where bureaucracy is massive. However, almost all of them emigrated to the United States. We think about it too, ”confesses Rossi.
Andrea Ottolia, professor of commercial law at the University of Genoa and an intellectual property expert, traces this problem back to three causes. «It is a question of corporate mentality that is still of the boss type: the brilliant founder struggles to dilute himself to make his business grow; it is a question of the ecosystem, with a state that does not create selective support and lack of venture capital. It is a matter of storytelling: we are not only the Great Beauty. What is missing? A homegrown model. Politics should favor collaboration between start-ups and large industry “.
This is the path taken by the Food Engineering Lab of the University of Genoa, where Patrizia Perego, full professor of chemical plants, and her students Alessandro Casazza and Margherita Pettinato, researchers, invented and patented a biorefinery system which, using different principles, extracts from vegetable food waste polyphenols, antioxidant molecules that the pharmaceutical industry exploits for their properties against inflammation and aging. “The same technology can be used to clean up materials, removing unwanted molecules from complex matrices,” explains Perego. “Precisely for this type of application, we signed a” non-disclosure agreement “with a large company in Northern Italy”.