Eat, Pray, Love - but make it tech | October 2024
The startups daring to mess with Italian cheese and chocolate, and the unlikely place you may find love this year
Ciao amici,
Up until now, I’ve made an effort to try and avoid stereotypes when writing about Italian business. But the more I cover it, the more I’m discovering the stereotypes exist for a reason.
So this month, I’m throwing all caution to the wind and going full Eat, Pray, Love.
That’s foodtech, accidental dating tech, and … we can save the prayers for Italy’s startup funding situation.
Despite being the most celebrated country in the world for gastronomy, Italy currently ranks bottom out of the top fifteen countries in Europe for startup funding in the foodtech sector to date. It raised a total of $259m in agritech and foodtech between 2015 and 2023, compared to the UK’s $2.1bn, according to Dealroom data. It’s even behind Norway and Iceland, lands of the pickled herring and not much else…
But there’s a handful of interesting startups emerging who want to reinvent typical ‘Made in Italy’ ingredients in a more sustainable form.
Doing so is not for the faint-hearted, so I delved deeper into the myriad challenges facing the sector in Italy with two companies — cheese alternative startup Dreamfarm and chocolate alternative startup Foreverland — this month.
Scroll down for the full interviews. Plus:
N26 returns to Italy
Even and Cyber Guru raise healthy rounds
Is WeRoad Europe’s only successful dating startup?
Amy
Unlock 6 Months of Notion Plus (worth $6,000)
Thousands of startups use Notion as a connected workspace to create and share docs, take notes, manage projects, and organize knowledge—all in one place. We’ve teamed up with Notion to offer our readers 6 months of new Plus plans, including unlimited Notion AI so you can try it all for free! To redeem the Notion for Startups offer:
1. Submit an application using our custom link: https://ntn.so/madeit and select Made IT on the partner list.
2. Include the partner key, STARTUP4110P10624
🏦 Bank of Italy lifts ban on N26. German neobank has apparently resolved its anti-money laundering and compliance failures sufficiently for Italy’s central bank to give it the green light to resume operations in the country. It comes after the Bank of Italy banned N26 from onboarding new customers in June 2022, shortly after its home country regulator BaFin imposed a similar growth cap in September 2021. BaFin lifted its restrictions on N26 in May this year. The lifting of these restrictions is good news for the growth at the bank, which has poured huge resources into fixing its compliance problem in the last couple of years.
🏥 Even raises €28m Series A. Even is a healthtech startup based out of Bengaluru, India, but cofounders Matilde Giglio and Alessandro Ialongo are Italian, so it deserves a shout out here. The startup, which has developed an alternative healthcare business model to the typical fee-for-service system in India that is instead aligned with patients’ financial means, has raised €28m from an impressive roster of international investors — including Silicon Valley’s Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, and 8VC. The company is growing fast. It has “hundreds of thousands” of members across its B2B and B2C offerings, according to Giglio, and has made €26m in revenues in its first 18 months. With the new funding, it plans to open actual hospitals, and the first “Even Hospital” will be in Bengaluru. If you want to learn more about Matilde Giglio’s journey, listen to her interview on Made IT 👇🎧
🤖 Cyber Guru raises €23m Series B. Rome-based Cyber Guru, a B2B software platform that helps companies train their employees to avoid cyber attacks, has raised €23m in Series B funding. The round was led by US-based Riverside Acceleration Capital, and joined by France’s EduCapital, Spain’s Adara Ventures and Italy’s P101 Ventures. The company says it now has more than 700 business clients across 90 countries, and will use the new funds to continue its expansion across Southern Europe in particular — that’s Italy, France and Spain.
🇮🇹 CDP Venture Capital invests €30m in 360 Capital’s new Italy-focused fund. 360, which is based between Italy and France and counts over €500m in assets under management, has launched a new fund — 360 Digitaly — to invest in early-stage startups in Italy. It says this investment from Italy’s state-backed investor is the fund’s first close, and it will continue raising and wants to attract other investors in the fund. It’s already made five investments out of the fund — including SaaS startup Zefi AI, and HR tech Talentware.
The intro to this newsletter featured the bleak stats on Italian foodtech funding, which doesn’t really square with the country’s gastronomic reputation. Italy’s food and beverage exports are on track to hit €70bn in 2024, according to new research released by Ismea this month, giving us a good idea of just how big the market for Italian food is globally. So why has the country been so much slower to innovate with its ingredients compared to its European peers?
Because in reality, Italy’s reputation for food makes it the ultimate “untouchable”, according to Maddalena Zanoni, cofounder of alternative cheese startup Dreamfarm, and Giuseppe D'Alessandro, cofounder of alternative chocolate startup Foreverland.
“Cheese is almost a religion for Italians,” says Zanoni of Dreamfarm, which has developed a plant-based cheese that has a fraction of the ingredients that most others have, thanks to a production process that mimics that of real cheese. Rather than being composed of a mixture of coconut oil and starch like most vegan cheeses, Dreamfarm uses a base of mediterranean almonds, which it then ferments with bacterias to convert the glucose sugars naturally present in almonds into lactic acids.
“In Italy, we are so linked to our tradition and I think that’s the beauty of our country,” Zanoni says. “But somehow, innovation for us is almost going more and more to the past, rather than the future.”
The Italian government’s full-on ban of the sale and marketing of cell-cultured meat in December 2023 is a case in point. As is the fact that any scrutiny of the true origins of Italian “classics” almost breaks the internet.
Zanoni and her cofounders eventually got over this fear and decided to prioritise the taste of their product over all else — its expensive ingredients list mean it’s definitely not the cheapest option on the shelf. But so far, she says this taste-led approach has worked surprisingly well in the Italian market. Dreamfarm is on track for its target revenues this year, and plans to triple those in 2025. Zanoni says that market research shows consumers in the UK and Germany are motivated to buy plant-based cheese due to climate concerns, but in Italy, consumers are motivated by their health, digestion and gut. Dreamfarm is focusing on the Italian cheese big hitters — it started out with a mozzarella (that floats in water like the real deal) and a cream cheese spread, and next week it’s unveiling a plant-based ricotta. Mascarpone and a herby spread are in the works, too.
“I was afraid to innovate in the Italian market, because we’re just so happy with our ingredients as they are,” Zanoni says. “You know, your grandma does it better.”
To hear the whole story of how Zanoni launched Dreamfarm tune into this Made IT episode 👇🎧
The irony of it all is that your Italian grandma was probably more open to innovating with ingredients than your millennial friends are today. D’Alessandro tells me that Foreverland’s entire carob-based chocolate product was in fact inspired by his own nonna.
“Experimenting with carob in R&D came about by accident, when my grandma mentioned that during the war when they didn’t have cocoa, they used to eat carob straight from the pods to substitute chocolate.”
Foreverland recently raised a €3.4m seed round from investors including 2100 Ventures and Exor Ventures to build a factory in Puglia so it can begin producing its newly developed flagship product, Choruba. The company’s cocoa-free sustainable chocolate alternative is made using Sicilian carob pulp, which is actually the waste product from companies on the island that use carob pods. It’s combined this with shea butter, rather than cocoa butter, to achieve chocolate’s snappable, meltable consistency. This shea butter is the only part of Foreverland’s supply chain that doesn’t hail from Italy. It’s currently sourced from a particular sustainable supplier in North Africa, but D’Alessandro says the company is working hard on finding an alternative fat it can get closer to home. Unlike Dreamfarm, Foreverland plans to sell B2B, rather than B2C. So why would a mass-market biscuit maker in Italy want to choose Choruba over a classic supplier of chocolate chips?
“Our first sell is the taste, which we think is better than alternatives. But the second, perhaps biggest one, is price,” says D’Alessandro. Surprisingly, Foreverland’s Choruba chocolate is six times cheaper than the company’s biggest vegan chocolate competitor. D’Alessandro says the company will focus at first on the “huge” Italian food manufacturing market for chocolate, but plans to take its product to other European countries once it’s cracked its hometown.
Curious to hear more about how Foreverland secured its seed round? Riccardo Bottiroli, CTO, spilled the beans in this Made IT interview 👇🎧
“I’ve lost track of how many WeRoad weddings and WeRoad kids there are,” Paolo De Nadai, founder of the Italian travel tech startup, told me at a startup dinner earlier this year.
Naturally, I had to take him to task on this statement. As it turns out, the startup isn’t operating as a secret cult, but its pre-organised trips for young professional travellers are turning out to be much more successful places to find love than the world’s struggling dating app startups.
In fact, De Nadai’s own sister met her husband (and now father to her child) on a WeRoad trip to Oman in 2018.
“I think dating apps are failing people because they’re so superficial,” De Nadai says. “But at WeRoad, we’re putting people in front of each other in real life so they’re sharing real experiences, which is how these things used to work.”
You’re in for the best chance of romance if you’re a straight man, however. WeRoad’s rapidly-growing customer base is currently 60% female and 40% male. Catch my full interview with De Nadai in the next edition of Il Digestivo, to get the lowdown on WeRoad’s rapid growth and next steps.
That’s it from Il Digestivo this month, we hope you’ve enjoyed the October edition.
We’d love to hear your feedback — or even better, your news tips. Send us an email at ildigestivo@gmail.com to share your thoughts.
Nice update! Maybe missed it, but couldn’t find any mention of the recently closed Italian 35m series B for Bizaway? Important that rounds in the series B phase get done for Italy as it’s, already in Europe, one of the more difficult funding phases to get through.