According to the 2020 Tech Scaleup Country ranking, an analysis published by Mind the Bridge with the support of AWS, Italy ranked 10th in terms of number of tech scale-ups in the European landscape, and 11th in terms of capital raised.
The analysis takes into account tech and digital companies that have raised over $ 1 million in capital since their inception, with at least one funding event since 2010.
As of December 2019, Italy accounted 228 scale-ups, able to raise overall $ 2.7 billion in capital. The majority of capital ($ 2.4 billion, 87% of total) was provided by Venture Capital firms – including private funds, public-supported equity funding vehicles, and corporates. The IPO channel is also increasingly considered as a viable option to raise growth capital (27 Italian scale-ups raised $ 326 million funding from the stock markets).
Overall, Italian tech scale-ups generated approx. $ 2.2 billion in revenues (about 0.08% of Italy’s GDP) and directly employed 13,000 people (0.06% of total employment). On average, they are small companies of about 25-50 people with approx. € 1.6 million in annual revenues.
The vast majority of Italian tech scale-ups (83%) are less than 10 years old, with an average lifespan of 7.5 years. On average, Italian start-ups take about 3.4 years to become scale–ups.
The gap that Italy has compared to other European countries remains significant. France and Germany have respectively 3 to 5 times more scale-ups than Italy; UK has more than 10 times the number of Italian scale-ups.
In terms of funding, the capital raised by German and French scale-ups is 10 and 7.5 times higher than Italy respectively, whilst in UK the overall funding is 24 times more.
But there are some signs of improvements for Italy: as mentioned in the report, change is driven by the new established “National Innovation Fund” – the € 1 billion government-sponsored program, supporting the Italian start-up ecosystem – and the increasing interest of corporates for start-up investments, looking for opportunities for effective corporate/start-up collaborations.
For more info on the National Innovation Fund: National Innovation Fund: the government-sponsored funds to boost the Italian start-up ecosystem
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For the detailed analysis, the full Report “Tech Scaleup Italy 2020” is available at the following link: https://mindthebridge.com/tech-scaleup-italy-2020-report/