March 15, 2021 Statistics

Statistics on Italian scale-ups: the 2020 analysis of Mind the Bridge

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 scaleups.

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/