The Medtech Startup FTnet Closes its Second Investment Round of €3 Million

FTnet, the startup that developed the Fdirect platform to innovate the drug distribution market in Italy through digitalization, closed 2023 with a second investment round of €3 million raised by friends & family.

The startup founded in 2021 by Marco Di Tonto and Stefano Beltrame, with long professional and entrepreneurial experience in the pharmaceutical sector, had already raised approximately €3 million in a previous round closed in November 2022 from investors outside the pharmaceutical sector.

The capital raised has already been partly invested in the design and development of Fdirect and in the growth of the team, going from 6 to 20 employees over the course of a year and now the rest of the collection will be used to support the needs related to the transition from the early phase stage to that growth.

“The success of this second round of fundraising confirms our company’s ability to attract capital based on the clear potential that our technological solution can express in Fdirect’s reference market,” declared Stefano Beltrame, co-founder of the project which aims to innovate the direct distribution model between pharmacies and the pharmaceutical industry, restoring value to an increasingly competitive and complex sector.

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FTNet has huge potential

The potential is great, if you consider that the pharmaceutical sector in Italy is worth around €25.7 billion (IQVIA 2023 data). The distribution model in Italy is in fact made up of manufacturing industries and pharmacies which – whether direct, through sales agents, or indirect through intermediate distributors – is essentially based on the classic customer-supplier relationship or on the establishment of partnership, of more or less long duration, between the wholesaler (or manufacturer) and the pharmacy owner.

FTNet therefore intends to revolutionize this relationship, often considered inflexible and sometimes economically burdensome by the parties involved. But how? Through a multi-sided platform that digitizes the commercial relationship between pharmacies and companies in a direct, simple and smart way. It is called Fdirect and has been online since the beginning of 2023.

A new frontier of pharmaceutical trade where pharmaceutical industries and pharmacies will be able to interact in real time thanks to an interface built on their needs, where all the information necessary to make the best strategic choices will be available , with support for complex decision-making processes.

A great opportunity for both the pharmaceutical industries, which would thus be able to reach a greater number of pharmacies; both for the pharmacies themselves whose turnover has contracted by 6.2% since 2010, against an increase in the number of sales points.

Now, after a 2023 marked by a seed phase, the new year opens on two fundamental fronts for the development and pursuit of company objectives: the start of a collaboration project with Alfasigma, one of the five main players in the pharmaceutical industry in Italy, which will see the light in the first months of 2024. Finally, the increasingly accelerated use of Artificial Intelligence.

The team is now working to allow pharmaceutical industries and pharmacies to interact with each other in real time, simplifying their commercial relationship, addressing their respective decision-making processes with more streamlined and effective flows thanks to the support of technologies integrated into the platform such as Business Intelligence and Data Integration and AI.

“Specifically, we are working on the development and application of AI for the stock sentinel function within the platform, which will allow you to make forecasts on future sales of the references handled in order to optimize your warehouse stocks,” concluded Di Tonto, CEO and co-founder of FTnet.

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(Featured image by James Coleman via Unsplash)

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

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