Dear Venture Capital Operators,
The past year has been a defining one for Venture Capital in Italy.
2025 was not just intense it was formative. It forced all of us to make choices, to take positions, and, in some cases, to slow down, rethink, and redesign how we operate.
As always, many questions are circulating. Some are structural, others emotional.
Is the ecosystem finally maturing? Are we really building something solid? And, most importantly: are we, as operators, doing enough to deserve the trust that capital and founders are placing in us?
Let’s start from an uncomfortable but necessary truth: we don’t predict the future. We cannot forecast macro cycles, exits, or technological winners with certainty. What we can do, especially as a young ecosystem, is read the signals of evolution and try to interpret them with discipline and responsibility.
What changed in 2025 is that belief started to be tested in practice.
Over the past year, the Italian ecosystem took several concrete steps forward. In the last 18 months alone, 14 new Italian venture funds have been launched. This means that more and more investors are choosing to allocate capital to Italian funds, and that trust in the ecosystem is growing among Limited Partners.
But trust in what, exactly?
When LPs invest in Italian VC funds, they are making a long-term bet: that over the next 5–10 years this ecosystem will generate startups capable of producing meaningful returns. And this naturally raises legitimate questions:
Why now? Why not 10 or 20 years ago?
Italy has no long list of historical VC success stories so why bet on this country today?
These are the exact questions we, as VC operators, hear every day. And they are the same questions we ask ourselves. After all, many of us could choose to do venture capital elsewhere. So why continue doing Venture Capital from Italy?
For me, the answer is simple: I believe that great results can be achieved in Venture Capital in Italy and I believe that today is the right moment.
The fact that 14 new funds have been launched in the last 18 months also means something else: a new generation of VC professionals is emerging. Venture Capital in Italy is still an underexplored market, but one that is rapidly professionalizing. And when an ecosystem professionalizes when you have more trained analysts, partners, and investment teams you increase your collective ability to identify the best companies early, invest in them, and support them over time.
A common objection remains: “But are there really great startups in Italy?”
“Can unicorns or, better, fund returners actually be built here?”
The answer is yes.
Over the past 10–15 years, several Italian-founded companies have proven that this is possible. Companies like Bending Spoons, Scalapay, Satispay, Musixmatch, Faceit, UnoBravo, Exein. I deliberately prefer the term fund returner to unicorn: what venture funds are truly looking for are companies that can return the entire fund with a single investment.
The surprising part is not that these companies were born in Italy it’s that many of them were not initially backed by Italian VC funds. Some were, fortunately, but many were not. So the real question is not whether Italy can generate exceptional companies. It clearly can. The real challenge is whether our ecosystem is capable of recognizing fund returners early enough, believing in them, and backing them decisively.
This is precisely why professionalization matters so much.
International investors have noticed this opportunity. Over the last two years, an increasing number of international funds have started investing in Italy not because they lack alternatives, but because, in their words, competition is still limited and deal quality is high. It is no coincidence that Base10 invested in Lexroom and Jet HR, Emblem VC in Volta and Pillar,RTP in Qomodo and Volta, Playground in Sizable, Balderton in Exein, Omens in Caracol, and many others.
Some of these international players have gone even further, opening operational offices in Italy: funds like Earlybird and Join Capital from Germany, Eurazeo, Partech, Sofinnova and Impact Partners from France, Axon Capital from Spain, and others soon to follow. This is a strong signal not of hype, but of long-term commitment.
Against this backdrop, at Italian Angels for Growth we have been focusing on two core pillars: professionalization and value creation.
Professionalization.
Out of the more than 550 angels who have passed through IAG over the years, around 50 have gone on to become GPs or full-time VC professionals. From day one, our mission has been to help angels think and act more like venture capitalists learning how funds make decisions, manage portfolios, and build long-term strategies.
Rather than seeing more mature ecosystems as competitors, we see them as classrooms. In 2025, together with a group of 30 angels, we visited leading VC funds in New York and Boston to understand how they work, how they differentiate themselves, and how they consistently generate returns. We also launched a training program with over 100 participants to help investors better understand how top-tier funds think. Becoming better investors is not optional it is our responsibility.
Value creation.
Investing in great companies is not enough. You must actively help them grow. In 2025, we focused heavily on building our platform a tool designed to truly leverage the strength of our community. With more than 500 angels CEOs, executives, and entrepreneurs we have the potential to create almost any meaningful introduction in the country. What we needed was a structured way to activate this value efficiently and intelligently.
For years, value creation in venture capital was promised more than it was delivered. Studying how the most advanced funds operationalize this concept allowed us to finally translate value from theory into practice.
Which brings me to the word that best summarizes where we stand as we enter 2026: trust.
Trust between investors.
Trust between investors and founders.
Trust in the idea that Venture Capital in Italy can be a serious, long-term asset class not a temporary experiment.
Venture Capital is, and always will be, a team sport. It only works if enough people choose to pull in the same direction, even when the outcome is uncertain.
2026 will not reward spectators.
It will reward those who choose to build.
Let’s do it together.
With trust,
Emanuele Torlonia
Managing Director, Italian Angels for Growth