New Venture Capitalist Seeks Italian Hi-Tech

5 Dec 2007 Yahoo! Italy (it.notizie.yahoo.com ) and Reuters – Roberto Bonzio (Milan)

English translation

Italy may not be the best country for hi-tech entrepreneurs in search of a development network and start-up loans for the development of original and new ideas, but a “next-generation” Venture Capital fund, founded a couple of months ago by an Israeli entrepreneur together with some other partners, is now also aiming at entrepreneurs with the right idea in Italy.

“Italians have the right mentality: ‘to the point’ and less formal in doing business, Silicon Valley style”, says to Reuters Israeli entrepreneur Yoav Andrew Leitersdorf, founder of YL ventures (www.ylventures.com), launched last May with a $30 million target to financing aspiring Bill Gates’.

With an experienced and driven team of investors, who have been in the technological venture capital field for years, YL Ventures, according to the company’s documentation, aims at the development and growth of software companies, providing both a strategic vision and financial and technological support as well.

The final goal is making these new companies more attractive for bigger buyers (especially US firms) within a period of 6 to 24 months.

Leitersdorf has a lot of experience in the field and has already made a lot of successful deals, such as the creation of a mobile software company in London (called Movota), which was sold to Bertelsmann AG and the invention of an online payment company, ExchangePath in New York, which was purchased for $25 million by the CMGI conglomerate.

The Israeli venture capitalist spoke at the “Italy-Silicon Valley Experience” last week, a videoconference between two Cisco locations in Monza and California, organized by the US Embassy within the “Partnership for Growth” initiative, a program designed to support meetings between Italian entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley investors.

“For us this is really interesting. In Italy there are a lot of academic institutions in the engineering field. The problem in Italy is to find a way to generate business out of these engineering talents”, says Leitersdorf.

Improvements in new online spaces (which seem to keep growing), he underlines, “allow us to find good ideas and exploit business opportunities, whether these come from universities or other places”.

Among those: OpenCoffeeClub (www.opencoffeeclub.org), a meeting point between entrepreneurs, developers and investors; blognation (it.blognation.com), a blog community with a focus on innovation; and BarCamp (www.barcamp.org), an online meeting point for people who want to share experiences and knowledge.

At the moment, YL Ventures is looking at 37 Italian companies on a preliminary basis.

“It’s not like we’re waiting for them to find us… we ask all companies to send us their business plans, but we do search for these companies ourselves”, says the venture capitalist.

There aren’t any boundaries or obstacles for Italian companies to play on an international level, but they should carefully select their investment partner.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

“Great companies have relationships and networks all over the world, Silicon Valley included, and entrepreneurs don’t need to travel but can depend on their relationships with venture capital investors like us”, says Leitersdorf.

For those companies interested in strategic acquisition in Italy, he adds, start-ups are especially interesting as the economy shows some well developed segments.

“Success stories such as Fastweb and Tiscali or companies as Mediaset (which did very well with the Endemol acquisition and took a big step towards digital media), constitute positive examples for Italian entrepreneurs.”

Also in the mobile telephone field, with one of the highest penetration rates in the world, and Internet, where Italy is one of Europe’s leaders in blogger numbers and broadband connections, the Italian environment is encouraging for entrepreneurs.

“A perfect place to start of working on the Internet before moving to the global market”, says YL Ventures’ founder, “we want to invest, we look for Italian entrepreneurs who are willing to put energy and drive in their work”.