One of the cofounders of Italy’s first unicorn Scalapay has raised $3.3m for his new startup Desia, an AI-led intelligence platform for investment professionals.
The round was led by Dig Ventures and featured participation from 2100 Ventures, Exor Ventures, and Octopus Ventures.
Raffaele Terrone, formerly the CFO at buy now, pay later company Scalapay, founded Desia alongside Alessandro Amaro and Mehmet Öner Yalçin, former employees of private equity giant Advent International.
What are they working on?
The trio are developing technology that uses artificial intelligence to sort through and analyse data on potential targets for investments. This process is typically done manually, Terrone tells Sifted, and takes up a lot of time for more junior roles in the financial services industry.
“If anything it’s really like a copilot like the ones you might see created by Microsoft, but this is fully vertical and dedicated to private equity and investment professionals,” he says.
Desia, which is emerging from stealth today, follows in the footsteps of other startups raising money for AI tools for investment professionals in the past six months. Earlier this month, UK firm Outward led a £1.7m round for Capsa AI, a startup creating an AI-enabled operating system to handle due diligence for private equity funds. And in May, Sweden’s Grasp, an AI assistant for investment bankers and private equity firms, received $1.9m in funding.
The Italian fintech flywheel
Desia’s funding round is an early indicator that Italy’s fledgling fintech scene is beginning to mature. Along with Scalapay, payments company Satispay was also founded in the southern European country in 2013 — it’s raised $511m in funding to date and was given a $1.1bn valuation in 2022.
Francesco Filia, the CEO of Fasanara Capital, an investment firm which took part in Scalapay’s seed round, says that the growing momentum in Italy is largely due to capital becoming available in the region.
“Across Europe, and especially in Italy, there has been a scarcity of capital available,” he says. “Now, things are changing.”
Filia says that there’s been more capital allocated to venture funds from the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, a prominent Italian developmental bank, and there’s also been a number of new firms set up to focus on Italy in recent years.
Still, Scalapay can’t exactly lay claim to the title of founder factory just yet. The fintech has only produced one other startup so far — former Scalapay product manager Alexandros Fokianos raised €1.6m for AI SaaS platform Zefi.ai in May.
Progress to be made
Terrone is hoping to change that. He acts as an advisor to emerging entrepreneurs in the ecosystem and made an angel investment in Zefi. He also says he receives a lot of messages from both current and former Scalapay employees for advice on taking the jump into entrepreneurship.
“I always tell them to stay in Scalapay because I’m still a shareholder, but if you really want to go, I can help you build something interesting,” he says.
But he admits there’s still some work to be done to encourage Italy’s new class of entrepreneurs to build in their home country. Desia, for instance, is headquartered in the UK and while Scalapay maintains a large presence in Italy, it’s incorporated in Ireland.
“Italy has certain advantages. It’s booming, it’s thriving and there’s a lot of investment so it’s definitely a good market,” he says. “But we cannot deny that in Europe, the UK is the number one [startup] market by far.”
