More than 12,000 startups, a record venture-capital market: Italy has never had such a developed technological ecosystem.
Yet its champions raise their funding in New York, London or Paris: Italy suffers not from a deficit of innovation, but from a deficit of capital.
The challenge is cultural: a family capitalism oriented towards patrimony must learn to finance the intangible and risk-taking.
The European technological revolution is now under way. The major European economies are mobilising substantial capital to bring forth their future champions. Italy is fully part of this dynamic. With more than 12,000 innovative startups, more than 200 incubators and accelerators, a venture-capital market that reached nearly €1.5 billion in 2025, and several companies that have become European reference points — Satispay, Scalapay, Bending Spoons and iGenius — it has never had such a developed technological ecosystem. Yet a paradox remains: why does Italian capital still finance so little of its own technology companies?
| The Italian technological ecosystem | Value |
|---|---|
| Innovative startups | more than 12,000 |
| Incubators and accelerators | more than 200 |
| Venture capital (2025) | ≈ €1.5 billion |
| Net household wealth (end of 2025) | more than €12,300 billion |
While Italian technology companies have never been so numerous or so competitive, many of them continue to find their principal investors in New York, London, Paris, Berlin or Zurich. In Italy, fundraising now reaches unprecedented amounts and attracts a growing number of American, British, French, German or Swiss funds, which today occupy a central place in the financing of high-potential companies.
Italy trains the talent, creates the companies and develops the technologies, but still finances only a limited part of their growth. Several Italian entrepreneurs, moreover, choose to pursue their development within international ecosystems offering a financial environment better suited to fast-expanding technology companies. Italy no longer suffers from a deficit of innovation. It suffers above all from a deficit of capital directed towards innovation. The problem therefore lies not in the quality of the technologies developed, but in the capacity to finance their change of scale. These startups excel precisely in the fields where the country already holds its main competitive advantages: robotics, Industry 4.0, life sciences, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence applied to industry, space technologies and new materials.
« Italy no longer suffers from a deficit of innovation: it suffers from a deficit of capital directed towards innovation. »
Corporate venture capital is developing, but it does not yet play in Italy the strategic role it occupies in the great international technological ecosystems. Now, large companies constitute, everywhere in the world, one of the main engines of innovation financing. Their more direct involvement in Italian startups would strengthen the links between industry, research centres, universities and investors. It would also make it possible to bring forth more companies comparable to Satispay, which has become one of the leading European fintechs, and whose growth was accompanied, at several stages, by international capital.
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The paradox of Italian family capitalism
Each model of capitalism produces its own economic culture, which each generation naturally tends to reproduce through the mechanisms that built its own success. As long as the mechanisms of value creation remain the same, this culture is an advantage. When they change, it must learn to adapt.
Family capitalism is one of the great strengths of the Italian economy. It has enabled the birth of thousands of companies of excellence, favoured a long-term vision and largely contributed to the international influence of Made in Italy. It would be profoundly mistaken to see in it an outdated model. On the contrary, it explains an essential part of the country’s industrial success.
It is precisely this success that today shapes the economic frames of reference of a large part of capital-holders. The leaders who made Italian industry prosper learned to create value in a universe dominated by factories, industrial equipment, economies of scale and tangible assets. The technological economy now rests on other logics: it leads one to invest in companies that sometimes possess neither industrial patrimony nor immediate profitability, but a considerable intangible capital — software, algorithms, disruptive technologies or intellectual property. The issue is therefore not generational: it is a matter of the economic frame of reference.
Two cultures of risk now coexist. When the patrimony already exists, when the company has been handed down over several generations and when wealth rests on assets whose value is known, risk is naturally assessed on the basis of what it might destroy. Conversely, the technology entrepreneur who does not yet have a substantial patrimony more readily perceives risk as the necessary condition of value creation. The former have something to preserve; the latter still have something to build.
« The former have something to preserve; the latter still have something to build. »
For several decades, Italian savings have naturally been directed towards the assets they know best: real estate, family businesses, bonds and patrimonial investments. This logic long accompanied the country’s industrial development and contributed to the emergence of several international champions.
Yet this patrimonial power contrasts with the results obtained in the technological economy. While Italian households had, at the end of 2025, a net wealth of more than €12,300 billion (Bank of Italy), a still-limited share of this wealth is directed towards the financing of innovation. This gap is reflected in the results:
| Country | Number of unicorns |
|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 57 |
| Germany | 33 |
| France | 29 |
| Italy | 4 |
The problem therefore lies not in the absence of capital, but in the way it is directed towards the technological economy so as to accompany the growth of the most innovative companies. To invest in a building is to protect a value that is already known; to invest in a startup is to finance a value that does not yet exist, but which one must be able to imagine. The best-performing technological ecosystems do not necessarily have more capital: above all, they have a culture that accepts transforming part of today’s patrimony into tomorrow’s wealth. The challenge of Italian family capitalism is therefore not to renounce its qualities, but to extend this culture of investment to the mechanisms of value creation specific to the technological economy.
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Europe as a capital market
The technological revolution now goes beyond national borders. Faced with the United States and China, no European state has, on its own, the financial depth needed to durably accompany all of its future technological champions. As the Draghi report underlined, Europe suffers neither from a lack of talent nor from a deficit of innovation, but from a persistent fragmentation of its financial markets.
For Italy, the stake is therefore not to substitute European capital for Italian capital. It consists in being able to access a European capital market deep enough to allow its technology companies to change scale without systematically depending on non-European investors.
Europe does not constitute an answer to the cultural deficit of Italian capitalism. It can, however, offer Italian companies a broader and more integrated financial environment, capable of accompanying their growth while keeping in Europe the decision-making centres, the intellectual property and the strategic technologies.
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The challenges of Italian capitalism
The aim of Italian capitalism is not to copy Silicon Valley. Nor is it to renounce the characteristics that made the success of its industry. It would, however, gain by drawing on what made its strength: its capacity to transform a technological revolution into a new culture of capital, investment and risk, without renouncing a model suited to its own industrial strengths. Italy already has one of the most solid manufacturing bases in Europe. Its future now depends less on the construction of a new industry than on its capacity to change the way its capital accompanies this productive base. All great economic transformations are also cultural transformations.
For more than a century, Italy built an economic culture suited to its industrial development. It must now adapt this culture to the mechanisms of value creation specific to the technological economy. No single measure can, on its own, transform a culture of investment forged over several decades. Clearer, more stable and more attractive tax incentives can help accelerate this evolution. They cannot, however, replace the indispensable transformation of mindsets, which will also depend on the emergence of a new generation of leaders, investors and intermediaries capable of bridging traditional industry, finance and the technological economy.
The stake is therefore not only to finance innovation more. It is to convince a new generation of investors that today’s technologies constitute tomorrow’s industrial patrimony.
« To convince a new generation of investors that today’s technologies constitute tomorrow’s industrial patrimony. »
For Europe, the stake is of the same nature, but on another scale: to build a space capable of financing its innovations, retaining control of them and bringing forth its own champions. Italy — with its contradictions, its paradoxes and its unique strengths — is undoubtedly today the most revealing laboratory of this transformation of European capitalism.
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Edoardo Secchi is President of the Club Italie France and Economic Adviser France-Italy.
