“How often do you think about the Roman Empire?”. It became a meme in 2022. In the US it turned into a cultural moment, “my Roman Empire” as shorthand for something that defines you and you think every time. If Americans think about the Roman Empire that much, imagine us. For Italians, Rome represents scale, ambition, engineering, infrastructure and global reach. It represents a time when we weren’t observers of history, we were shaping it. Today that legacy risks feeling distant. We walk past it in our cities. We study it in school.
When the conversation shifts to startups and venture capital, the narrative changes. For too long we’ve echoed the notion that Italy produces “no unicorns”. The same two or three big names get recycled in panels and articles as if they were the only data points available. The ecosystem is framed as structurally weak, chronically late, permanently behind but that narrative is incomplete. With a simple search, you can uncover dozens of Italian-born founders who have built billion-dollar companies abroad. In fact, the number is well north of fifty Italian founders globally who have built or co-built unicorn-level companies. Founders, not just early employees. The real story isn’t the scarcity of examples. It’s our unwillingness to look beyond the obvious ones. This dismisses a vibrant reality: venture capital may have arrived late and slowly in Italy but Italian entrepreneurial quality has been silently collecting victories across Europe and beyond. Instead of lamenting our unicorn count, we should celebrate the global imprint of Italian talent.
What I genuinely struggle to understand is how rarely these founders are featured in Italian media. How is it possible that there are so few interviews, so few deep-dive podcasts, so little spotlight on people who have built companies at global scale? As an Italian, I find that hard to accept. If we don’t tell these stories ourselves, we can’t complain when the narrative about our ecosystem stays small. If we don’t study and celebrate our top founders, we are artificially lowering our own ambition ceiling.
Italy has never lacked talent. Across centuries we’ve influenced art, design, music, science, engineering and industry. The instinct to build has not disappeared in the last twenty years. If anything, it has simply migrated. When you look carefully, Italian founders have been building meaningful, venture-scale companies, just not always from Milan or Rome.
Consider the Italian founders quietly behind some of the world’s hottest startups:
- Marco Cancellieri, co-founder of Trade Republic. Today Trade Republic is valued at €12.5 billion and serves over ten million customers from a mobile app.
- Neri Tollardo, Italian-born CEO and co-founder of Plata (Mexico’s high-growth digital bank). Plata has raised over $1.6 billion and was recently valued around $3.1 billion, transforming banking for millions of underbanked in Latin America.
- Niccolò Perra, co-founder of Pleo (Copenhagen spend-management platform). Pleo has raised about $350 million and reached a $4.7 billion valuation, proving Italian entrepreneurs can lead European fintech innovation.
- Francesco Agosti, co-founder and CTO of Phantom (Solana-based crypto wallet). Phantom raised a $150 million Series C in 2025 and is valued at roughly $3 billion, making crypto accessible to 15+ million users worldwide.
- Carlo Gualandri, founder/CEO of Soldo (London spend-management fintech). Soldo raised $180 million in 2021, led by global investors like Temasek and supports tens of thousands of businesses across Europe.
- Paolo Cerruti, co-founder of Northvolt (Swedish EV battery-maker). Cerruti helped raise nearly €20 billion for Northvolt’s massive gigafactories before its U.S. Chapter 11 in late 2024.
- Andrea Carcano and Moreno Carullo, co-founders of Nozomi Networks (U.S. industrial cybersecurity). In 2025 they agreed to a $1 billion acquisition by Mitsubishi Electric. From a 10-person startup to a category leader.
- Marco Ferrara, co-founder and Chief Digital Officer of Form Energy (Massachusetts battery startup). Form Energy has now raised over $1.2 billion to commercialize iron-air batteries.
They remind us: Italian DNA is in the code of many unicorns, even if their headquarters lie elsewhere. Our narrative should shift from “Italy can’t produce unicorns” to “Italy produces unicorn-makers”.
With a population of 60 million, the idea that we don’t have 20/30 people capable of building global companies is simply not credible. The evidence already proves the opposite: Italian founders compete and win on the global stage. Why have so many had to leave Italy to thrive? For years, Italy’s startup ecosystem suffered from thin capital markets and a risk-averse culture. Venture funds were scarce, so ambitious founders often found financing and partners abroad. At home, bureaucracy and an education system that prized “safe” careers dampened entrepreneurial spirit. Italians answered the call but outside Italy. In short, our best talent proved it could change industries; our “brain drain” statistics proved it had to do it elsewhere.
These conditions are changing. More international funds are allocating to Italian startups. More operators who built abroad are returning with experience, networks and capital. More young Italians see startups as a serious path, not a reckless deviation. A new generation of VCs is thinking in venture terms (portfolio construction, power laws and long-term optionality) not just short-term downside protection. Culturally, something subtle but important is shifting. The automatic prestige of the “safe” path is weakening. Ownership, leverage and technological ambition are becoming more attractive than titles. AI and frontier technologies are lowering barriers and creating asymmetric opportunities. For the first time in a while, ambition feels aligned with possibility. The Italian startup ecosystem is still young. Comparing it to ecosystems that have had decades of compounding venture capital is intellectually lazy. The more relevant question is what happens when Italian founders combine global ambition with a maturing local infrastructure. What happens when brain drain becomes brain circulation.
This is exactly the thesis behind IAG. We invest in the top 0.1% of Italian founders globally wherever they choose to build. Not geographically constrained. Not domestically limited. We back the best Italian founders in the world because the pattern is clear: at the very top end, Italian founder quality is exceptional.
Beyond these founders, there is an even larger wave forming. Hundreds of Italian operators, engineers, product leaders and early employees are currently working inside global unicorns. They are learning how scale really works. I can’t wait to map and analyze that layer because that’s where I’ll be deploying my next chips.
I was born in Italy and I don’t just love this country, I believe in it. With all its contradictions, all its chaos, all its beauty. Italy shapes how you think. It sharpens your taste. It forces you to be resourceful. It gives you creativity under constraint and resilience under pressure. You carry that edge with you wherever you go.
That’s why I have absolute conviction that the next generation of Italian founders will build companies at a scale we’ve never seen. Not because I am entitled to it but because the talent is here, the ambition is rising, the capital is forming and the mindset is shifting. Stop asking whether it’s possible and start acting as if it’s inevitable.
So when someone asks me, “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?” My answer is simple: always.
Building at scale is not foreign to us. It’s part of who we are. We’ve shaped industries, movements and eras before. We can do it again, this time in technology, in venture and in global innovation.