Italian Angels for Growth just wrapped its fifth Innovation Trip, and this time London was the destination: Europe's startup capital by deal count, capital deployed, and sheer density of Tier 1 funds. Previous trips taught us patience and the slow art of building community around pre-seed founders. London asked a tougher question: what does it actually take to play at the level of the funds that move the European market? Over the course of the trip we sat down with Atomico, Octopus Ventures, Connect Ventures, DN Capital, Molten Ventures, NAP, and a panel of emerging managers nicknamed the "Young Guns." Their answer had less to do with luck than with method.
The first lesson is that fund architecture is a strategic choice, not an operational footnote. Atomico spent twenty years building a founder led model where capital is just the entry ticket to something bigger: a Growth Acceleration Team that sits inside portfolio companies and works on talent, go to market, and communications. Molten Ventures applies the same logic to the capital structure itself, blending a listed vehicle, EIS/VCT funds, and a dedicated Growth Fund to keep creating fresh vintages without ever being held hostage by the usual ten year fundraising cycle. The takeaway for IAG is simple: capital alone no longer wins the best deals. You need infrastructure, data, and operating muscle that you can hand to a founder like a platform.
The second lesson is that portfolio math has to be ruthless. Octopus Ventures and Connect Ventures land in very different places but agree on one thing: power law returns aren't managed by gut feel, they're managed by hard rules. Octopus standardizes its ticket at £100k to £200k across 80 to 100 companies and refuses to lead follow on rounds itself, choosing instead to syndicate pro rata rights to its own LPs. Connect goes the other way, concentrating on 25 companies and tightening the standard deviation of its initial ownership from 6.1% to 2.5% between its first and fourth fund, so that when the winner shows up, it actually moves the needle. Same lesson, opposite playbooks: spread wide enough that you never miss the outlier, or concentrate hard enough that you never waste it. What both models kill off is the comfortable middle ground, the discretionary ticket decided deal by deal, which is still business as usual in Italy.
The third lesson is the rise of the Solo GP and the first time fund. NAP, born out of Cavalry, made a deliberate choice to stay under €100 million, scrapped the weekly investment committee in favor of a daily one, and gets term sheets out the door in three to five days. Speed isn't a nice to have here, it's treated as the only moat that actually holds up against bigger, slower, more bureaucratic funds. The emerging manager panel made the same point from a different angle. No Label Ventures builds its thesis around founders from the diaspora who broke away from the labels their home community tried to put on them. Outlier Grove has built proprietary tools to track where the next wave of standout founders is coming from, ex Palantir, ex DeepMind. Mova Capital found its edge in vertical AI for blue collar industries, which happens to be exactly the lane where Italy, with its sprawling manufacturing base, has the most to win and the least competition to worry about.
The fourth lesson is probably the hardest one for a young market like ours to swallow: access beats selection. The best European founders aren't out looking for capital, they're filtering it, and they discard anyone who doesn't bring strategic value or reputation to the table. More than once during the trip, the same playbook came up, half jokingly called the Trojan horse strategy: position yourself as a co investor or LP alongside Tier 1 European funds, earn institutional validation, and use that to unlock direct allocation into deals you'd otherwise never see.
The fifth lesson is letting go of the perfect exit myth. The numbers shared by Molten and others are blunt: 85% of European exits happen through trade sales, not IPOs, and for the top performing funds liquidity is never really a problem, there's always a growth stage buyer ready to take a stake off your hands. The secondary market isn't a fallback option, it's an active tool for rotating the portfolio, and not having one is a structural gap in the Italian ecosystem worth closing.
One thread ran through every meeting: AI has stopped being just an investment thesis and become the actual infrastructure of how VC funds operate. DN Capital qualifies 5,000 companies a month and has 5x'd its sourcing team's output. NAP talks openly about the shift from SaaS to "service as software," where value no longer sits in the license but in the work that gets done automatically. For an Italian VC, picking up these tools isn't a competitive edge anymore, it's table stakes just to stay in the game.
London leaves us with a tougher inheritance than Berlin. Spotting great founders isn't enough anymore. You have to build a position strong enough that they choose you, with discipline on ticket size, speed of execution, real data infrastructure, and a network of institutional alliances that opens the door to deals at the European level. That's the next operating frontier for IAG, and it's a project we've already started building.
Emanuele Torlonia, Managing Director IAG
