Italy’s Rialto Ventures has secured funding for more than €55 million and is more than halfway deployed, with eight investments already completed. 

Rialto is focused on supporting European founders operating in hard tech sectors which demonstrates domain expertise in recession-proof strategic verticals, such as developer tools, robotics, non-gen AI, cybersecurity, AR/VR, Enterprise SaaS, tech-enabled healthcare, and cloud services.

The fund is targeting European founders at Series A stage in B2B tech verticals, with the potential to deliver industrial-scale digital transformation.

Industry-connected founders with deep domain expertise

General Partners Simone Brunozzi and Stefano Quintarelli both have a wealth of experience building and scaling tech companies.

Brunozzi was formerly a Senior Tech Evangelist for AWS and VP and Chief Technologist at VMware. He also held positions as operating partner at US investment firm Cota Capital and co-founded micro-fund Mission & Market and digital skills platform Cloud Academy acquired in 2019. 

Quintarelli founded I.NET, Italy’s first internet service provider, which IPOed with a €1.9 billion market cap and was acquired by British Telecom, invented the Italian government’s public identity system SPID , former chair of the Italian Digital Agency and advisor to the European Commission and the United Nations.

Alessandro Profumo joined the Rialto team as Chairman and Partner. As the former CEO of UniCredit, Europe’s second-largest bank, Leonardo S.p.A., Italy’s largest aerospace and defence company, and Monte Dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, he will deploy his extensive network to support the firm’s portfolio.

The GPs collectively have invested in over a hundred businesses, returning highly successful exits, including Sysdig, Aumni, Eight Sleep, Truelayer, Replit, and others. Both co-founders whp have personally invested into the fund, reside in Italy, and the wider team is based between Italy and the US.

Rialto I investments

A large portion of Rialto’s €100M target for ‘Rialto I’ has already been deployed, backing:

• AIDEM, the privacy first demand-side platform for B2B online advertising
• K-Sport, the AI-driven performance monitoring platform for professional sports teams
• Keyless, the AI Biometric and Cybersecurity platform
• Medicilio ,the medtech enabling access to quality healthcare diagnostics outside of hospitals
• Platformatic, the open source backend development platform
• V-Nova, the advanced high-resolution video compression software provider
• A yet-to-be-announced SaaS platform for the tourism sector

Simone Brunozzi, General Partner at Rialto Ventures, said: 

“The best European founders look to the US to raise, starving European investors of breakout growth success. 

We act as a modern ‘consigliere’: we partner with Europe’s world-class talent before they make that jump. 

So, our LPs participate in exceptional success stories, and these founders gain from meaningful capital and guidance at an earlier stage.”

Lead image: Rialto Ventures. Photo: uncredited.