By Gianluca Dettori
This week saw the completion of a transaction through which Iubenda joined the Team Blue group. As part of the transaction, the stake held by Digital Investments—the first seed fund launched in 2010 by the Primo Ventures investment team: Niccolò Sanarico, Antonio Concolino, Franco Gonella, and myself—was sold.
The sale was a significant event for us—what we might call a milestone in industry jargon. This transaction solidifies our track record as an investment team and establishes a reliable initial estimate of the fund’s final return, with significant returns for our investors. But the real milestone for us is being able to draw a line under the last 15 years of work, to tell ourselves that we’ve done a good job and achieved our ultimate goal.
In Italy, it is possible to engage in venture capital profitably and drive economic development.
This reasoning is certainly more obvious today, but when we co-founded dpixel with the idea of creating an investment fund for Italian startups, this concept was much less clear. In hindsight, it was an impossible undertaking, in a market that didn’t exist, at the worst possible time to raise a venture fund—in Italy—where investments were nonexistent and the startups that recklessly dared to launch were few and far between, having been swept away by the dot-com bubble, as I recounted in a recent book of mine. In our first year of scouting, we were able to analyze fewer than 100 projects to make our initial investments. That wasn’t enough, so we decided to launch the Barcamper and go out looking for people like Andrea Giannangelo, founder of Iubenda. To find them, train them, and fund them. Traveling around Italy, on college campuses—in this case, on an epic tour with Motel Connection. According to the venture capital playbook, Iubenda was one of those investments that shouldn’t have been made. Andrea was barely of legal age, on his first entrepreneurial venture, alone with a PowerPoint presentation that was initially unclear, and in a sector that didn’t even exist yet (today we call it legal tech). We invested with a very small fund, with little chance of finding co-investors.
We invested with a very small fund, with little chance of finding co-investors. But we believe that early-stage venture capital is, above all, a people business: Andrea clearly had incredible talent, tremendous tenacity, intelligence, and ambition. And as my mentor Elserino Piol always says: “Startups are like hornets: they seem impossible to look at, but then at a certain moment they surprisingly manage to fly.” His story was beautifully told by Riccardo Luna in this post on Italian Tech.
The fund has completed a total of 19 investments, enabling the creation of companies such as Iubenda, Cortilia, Brandon Group, Vivaticket, Viamente, Sardex, and Kiver. Today we can finally say that all of this has made sense, not only because it demonstrates that venture capital can be a profitable, legitimate—indeed, necessary—asset class in investors’ portfolios today, but also because it highlights how this type of entrepreneur can create significant companies with extremely high growth and added value for society at large. Today, the companies funded by Digital Investments collectively have over 400 employees, generate revenue of around a couple of hundred million euros, are profitable, and are growing at double-digit rates—sometimes triple-digit.
This would also validate the investment thesis on which we founded dpixel—namely, that investing in startups not only benefits investors’ portfolios but also generates enormous external economic value for society. After ten years of dedicated service, I have stepped down from my role as a director at Iubenda, having had the privilege of working alongside Andrea Giannangelo to build a solid software company from a PowerPoint presentation. It will be interesting to see how it develops in the coming years, now that the company has all the tools it needs to scale. Thanks to the entire team at Klecha & Co and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton for their legal assistance: congratulations on your extremely professional and incisive work! Andrea’s journey, and that of the entire Iubenda team, continues on a new trajectory, just as our journey in venture capital does.
