What opportunities will technology offer to facilitate co-investment operations? Syndicate Investing could be a way to bridge the delay we accumulated in the funding of startup initiatives, especially in Seed and Venture capital rounds?
The main Italian operators, from the Italian Investment Fund to Venture Capital, Business Angels networks and Equity Crowdfunding platforms shared their points of view last week, hosted by the Fintech District on the occasion of the event organized in partnership with 200Crowd and Digital Magics: “Syndicate Investing: aka how co-investing foster startup ecosystem”.
According to Innocenzo Cipolletta, chairman of Italian Investment Fund and keynote speaker of the event, “Italy is one of the best countries for developing venture capital, given our high percentage of SMEs per inhabitant and our skills of doing business and research”. “There are the resources necessary to support a correct venture capital activity – he explained – but all sectors will need to contribute in order to invest in innovation and startup more bravely”.
Paolo Anselmo, chairman of IBAN, Giancarlo Rocchietti, chairman of Club degli Investitori, and Aurelio Mezzotero, Managing director at IAG, are the right people to investigate about the co-investment approach in venture and seed capital operations, during this initiative about Syndicate Investing, by analysing roles and opportunities in the Italian context.
After pointing out that the crowdfunding should not be regarded as “the last chance saloon for Italian startup, because it is an effective opportunity”, Rocchietti emphasised the need to “involve public and private investors: this is exactly the strong point of crowdfunding platforms”.
The investors, on the other hand, would be called on to look at the situation also from the point of view of the entrepreneur to understand what kind of difficulties might occur related to co-investment and syndicate investing. According to Mezzotero, “in a market like the Italian one, we’d better start to educate investors, also crowd, as regards the startups’ valorisation” but the real challenge of crowdfunding, now, is “to try not to ruin the market by proposing wrong projects”.
All the speakers of this session, by analysing the different types of investors, stimulated by the moderator of the event, Emil Abirascid, director of Startupbusiness, have also agreed that “woman that invest are generally braver than men and are more able to understand the kind of person behind a startup”.
In the following session of the event, focused on “how syndicate investment works”, Marco Gay, CEO of Digital Magics, Betsy Robinson, Investment Director of Quadrivio, Lorenzo Franchini, founder of ScaleIt, and Matteo Masserdotti, CEO of 200Crowd, pointed out that crowdfunding platforms “often save or launch companies that had been ignored by investment funds”. Gay concluded by returning to the theme introduced by Cipolletta, venture capital development in Italy, observing how our country is currently “a place where foreign investors find opportunities that we may also seize”.