The lean journey
I am on a continuous two-way journey from Entrepreneurship to Angel Investing, currently member of Angel’s Den in London, Angel Investor of four (very cool) start-ups, advisor to awesome start-ups and mentor in Bright Sparks run by Vodafone and Oxford University Innovation, London Techstars Accelerator, Virgin Startups and TechItalia:Lab Incubator.
I started Angel Investing almost by accident, which sounds strange to say: who “accidentally” invests his own money into highly speculative ventures? Well, I did.
I was running my own startup at that time and I was tasked with exploring the world of investors because we wanted to raise funds to fuel our idea and turn it into a product. A friend introduced me to a group of Angel Investors and I got hooked.
Investing is an exciting, interesting process. Sometimes is about due diligence, sometimes is about gut’s feeling. It always is about creating a relationship with the leadership team and understanding if they really know what they are doing. Occasionally, I also have the honour to actually help and contribute to shaping the execution.
This is a wonderful feeling. And great fun!
Here’s my experience:
Accelerators
Techstars (2018 – Now) – Mentor
Techstars is the leading worldwide startup accelerator. I am a mentor of the London based accelerator.
Virgin Startup (2018 – Now) – Mentor
Virgin Group’s not-for-profit organisation, helping entrepreneurs in England & Scotland to start, fund and scale their business. I am a mentor in London.
TechItalia:Lab Incubator (2017 – Now) – Mentor
London based incubator with an intensive 10-week mentor-led programme supporting Italian-speaking start-up young entrepreneurs launch their ideas off the ground, accelerate their growth, and conquer English-speaking markets. I am one of the historical mentors.
Bright Sparks (2018 – 2019) – Mentor
One of the ten mentors selected out of 120k employees worldwide to help start-ups in the #BrightSparks programme run by Vodafone and Oxford University Innovation.
Mentoring and startupper
Bridged (2021 – 2022) – Mentor
Empower people to take action on your content, while enhancing engagement and retention!
Handshakr (2020 – 2021) – Mentor
A B2B Orchestration Platform and Consulting Services combined.
Compare Ethics (2019 – Now) – Mentor
Compare Ethics empowers its ethically conscious community to find certified and verified sustainable products and services.
FitSQD (2020 – 2021) – Mentor
The app for workout sharing.
Oxtractor (2018 – 2019) – Mentor and Board Advisor
Oxtractor is a Software as a Service that extracts key information from user generated content by using AI and NLP to create actionable insights for businesses.
3co (2018 – 2019) – Mentor
3co is the world’s simplest solution for showcasing beautiful products in augmented reality – 3D scanning robotics & augmented reality APIs for iOS & Android e-commerce apps to help businesses increase customer conversion rate and decrease likelihood of return.
Grumgo (2017 – 2018) – Advisor for go-to market and partner strategy
Smart city travel with help of AI, travel psychology and cognitive neuroscience.
Timelicious (2015 – 2016) – Co-founder, CMO, Visionary and Dreamer
I proactively participated to establishing all aspects of the business. My focus was to relentlessly orchestrate our go-to-market effort, by leading our product development, marketing communications and sales.
Timelicious featured a smart habit collector and an A.I. recommendation engine that would suggest extraordinary city experiences and places for your free time. A personal assistant but also a best friend and a very well informed local, embodied in a bigger technological frame: a smart platform that helped finding great suggestions on how to make the best use of anybody’s spare time.
Matrimoniando (2001 – 2008) – Co-founder and Business Development
Launched a wedding consultancy business from standing start, with a wedding bot that built the experience online – undertook business planning, product development and marketing, including social media. Married >250 couples and generated nearly €1M of revenue.
Angel Investor
SingularityNET (2017)
The world’s decentralized AI network, letting anyone create, share, and monetize AI services at scale.
HyperSentience (2017)
Using deep learning to convert any object of any material and shape into an intelligent HyperSurface: seamlessly merging the physical and data worlds without the need for keyboards, buttons or touch screens.
Teragence (2017)
Teragence delivers insights based on hyper-granular competitive network analytics for any network operator, anywhere, any time – in real time.