The jury of the Web Marketing Festival selected us from over 500 applications submitted to them, making us one of the 36 finalists and also bringing home an award as a project in the fintech segment (thanks to Starboost!).
We come back from the experience of the first major event in attendance, full of energy, positive and aware of the great potential of Italian start-ups and their talents, despite the fact that the ecosystem that should support them continues to suffer from a penalising lack of risk capital.
The overall numbers show significant VC growth in Europe, which almost reached $60bn in the first half of 2021:
But, in the face of this very positive data, there emerges a pitiless gap between Italy and other successful countries, whose attempts to catch up to date continue to be in vain:
Here is the point: we were competing with other startups from other sectors/technologies, and it was very interesting to compare ourselves with them and to find out how high the level is, and how difficult it is for everyone to raise capital in the Bel Paese, a critical difficulty in the seeding phase and where crowdfunding has been making an increasing contribution for some years now.
This is why we, as a startup ourselves, have chosen to innovate the process of raising capital, especially in the early stages of a startup’s life, the so-called ‘seeding’. Since this is mostly absent in Italy, we respond with a global platform on blockchain.
This is why we intend to launch V.2 of the platform in the autumn, unveiling its new features at WMF 2021, which represents a bridge to the “smart” and highly risk-averse liquidity circulating in the blockchain ecosystem: decentralised finance (or DeFi).
A bridge to NON-blockchain startups, which are the majority and have disruptive ideas, applying equally innovative technologies or business models. We believe that blockchain technology, like Internet protocol, will become pervasive, but it will take some time; the concept of *decentralisation*, which is not just a matter of the underlying technology, needs an evolutionary path in terms of mindset.
In this transitional phase, SEED Venture aims to be the solution: an alternative, natively decentralised capital-raising tool that meets the different and often conflicting needs of the various players: start-ups, investors, traders and holders.
On the basis of these assumptions, it was therefore in the interest of the ecosystem of Italian start-ups and/or Italians to capture their sentiment after a long period of pandemic that has put us all to the test, in order to analyse whether and how it has been overcome.
It is with satisfaction that we thank Innovup, which has taken up this stimulus by launching a national survey aimed precisely at photographing the state of the art of the startup ecosystem, the results of which will be valuable both for Innovup in directing its future activities (policy advisory and policy making), and for the entire ecosystem in order to gather ideas and listen to critical issues, of which “fundraising” is by no means the only hot topic.
The results will be important, not least for us, as we are proposing a new way of raising funds for all those start-ups wishing to approach a decentralised world, not just a ‘financial’ one, in order to build their projects. We have learned to be guided by the market and its needs.
And speaking of the market, decentralised finance is not only of interest to start-ups.
Every day, new people decide to enter the world of virtual currencies, and today more than 2 million users (a figure reached in a few months) interact with products and services built on the blockchain through smart contracts, the same ones that make DeFi work. Once the scenario is understood with a bit of effort, and the potential for growth is glimpsed, everything becomes clearer: the fluidity of virtual money, the liquidability of assets, peer-to-peer interaction with software and financial autonomy. Something that we at SEED Venture consider revolutionary, and which we intend to see adopted!
It starts with a survey, inviting all innovative entrepreneurs to participate, then through SEED Venture you can enter: let’s bet you never come back? ????
