€3.5 Million Round for FoolFarm, the Startup Factory

New €3.5 million round for FoolFarm, a European startup studio specializing in deep tech (frontier technologies including Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Augmented Reality, Blockchain), founded by Andrea Cinelli, former creator of Libero and Alice. The company, founded in July 2020, is a kind of startup factory that has opened its studios in Milan (and soon in Rome) to support the birth from scratch and development of new businesses.

The new capital increase of €3.5 million at an evaluation of about €22 million allows the group to confirm itself among the most capitalized venture builders in Europe with a growth in value of +300% compared to the previous capital increase in 2021. New shareholders include IBL Banca, KPMG, Renato Dalla Riva, former chairman of Cedacri, and a string of Italian investors represented by the company Ottavia. We caught up by phone with Andrea Cinelli, Ceo of FoolFarm, while he is in Lisbon for the Web Summit.

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The round transaction

“Through this capital increase FoolFarm becomes one of the largest European Venture Builders by capitalization in just 2 years,” Cinelli told StartupItalia. “We are really proud of the entry of these new partners, companies, and profiles of absolute excellence, who have shown full confidence in our project and thus consolidated our growth path at the European level that wants to take us to IPO soon,” he added.

The capital increase will allow FoolFarm to “support the expansion at the national level with the opening of the operating office in Lecce, where in collaboration with the university system it aims to develop new startups in strategic sectors such as agritech, footech, impact, energy, and sustainability,” added Cinelli from Lisbon. And he announced, “On November 23 we will land in Rome: we will launch the innovation day-the venture business program on the capital, a square that is also strategic for us. FoolFarm wants to be the factory that will build, in Italy and Europe, the new startups that will develop the huge market of the so-called “Deep Tech,” disruptive technologies that will solve the big problems of our generation including, for example, climate change, helping to realize a venture capital model that is more profitable for investors and more solid for startuppers.”

FoolFarm’s Leap

In the past twelve months, FoolFarm has launched four successful startups developing more than €15 million in terms of asset value and raising investments of more than €1.5 million through its investment community, the Fooler Club: Voiceme, which enables the transformation of a person’s voice into his or her digital identity, allowing the user to legally sign through his or her voice; IIO a Voice-as-a-Service platform that enables the development of new conversational applications without privacy concerns; Fragmentalis, a cybersecurity startup that protects the data of companies and its customers through data pulverization; UpME, the first “augmented intelligence” platform that enables through AI to provide each employee with his or her own digital “alter-ego” of his or her own knowledge allowing a saving in terms of time needed to find information of more than 50minutes/day in a context where information sources (email, chat, documents… ) are now multiple and difficult for all of us to manage.

FoolFarm also completed the capital increase (Pre-Seed) of its 3rd startup Fragmentalis, launched last June and based on the technology of “data pulverizing,” and which raised €300,000, through a Convertendo with a valuation between €3.5million and €6 million, from FoolFarm’s investment community, the Fooler Club. Finally, FoolFarm will launch in the coming weeks the investment vehicle FoolCapital, the first European deep tech software fund based on Venture Building criteria, an absolute novelty in the Italian and European scenario that aims to raise 30 million euros to get to invest by 2027 in more than 40 startups in pre-seed, seed, and Series A stages.

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(Featured image by StartupStockPhotos via Pixabay)

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First published in StartupItalia a third-party contributor translated and adapted the article from the original. In case of discrepancy, the original will prevail.

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