There are few statistics on Italian scale-ups, a good analysis is produced by Mind the Bridge together with Startup Europe Partnership.
They define “scale-up” a company that has raised at least € 1 million since its inception, and they analyse companies with at least one funding event since 2010.
As of December 2017, Italy ranked 11th in the European Scaleup Europe ranking. This because, unlike other European countries – such as UK, France, Germany, and even Spain – Italy is contributing with a few hundreds of millions of euros for supporting companies each year. The UK has injected 20 times the capital recorded in Italy, Germany 11 times and France 7 times.
Overall, the total number of scale-ups recognised in Italy are 575, and they collectively have raised € 5,4 billion.
If we focus on tech companies operating in the ICT sector, the number of Italian scale-ups is 178, for a total of € 1.3 billion raised, representing 3,2% of the total scale-ups registered in Europe, and 1,6% of the total capital raised in Europe.
88% of the money raised by Italian companies has been provided by Venture Capital funds, of which: 43% domestic VC funds; 20% VCs from the USA; 11% VCs from the UK; and the remaining 2% by investors from other countries all over the world.
In the first 6 months of 2018, other 23 Italian companies have reached the scaling-up phase, and this increases the total number of Italian tech scale-ups to 201 companies.
The Italian scale-up ecosystem is pretty younger compared with the ecosystems of other main European countries: 67% of scale-ups have been established between 2010 and 2014, and only 20% before 2010 (this data is 35% on average in Europe).
Because the Italian scale-ups take some time to get access to significant funding, a lot of them move abroad for funding: the USA and the UK are the two preferred countries.
SOURCES:
You can find the detailed statistics produced by Mind the Bridge and Startup Europe Partnership in the Report “Tech Scaleup Italy 2018” at the following link:
https://mindthebridge.com/tech-scaleup-europe-sep-monitor-2018