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Hard Tech Venture Capital Fund Rialto 1 Steps Out of Stealth with €55M Raised and 8 Investments
European venture firm Rialto, has publicly announced its first fund, established by AVM Gestioni SGR Spa, has secured funding for more than €55 million and is more than halfway deployed, with eight investments to date already completed.
The fund is targeting European founders at Series A stage in B2B tech verticals, with the potential to deliver industrial-scale digital transformation.
General Partners Simone Brunozzi and Stefano Quintarelli both have a wealth of experience building and scaling tech companies. Brunozzi is formerly a Senior Tech Evangelist for AWS, where he met tech unicorns such as AirBnB, Dropbox, Uber, Twilio, Twitter/X, and many others, and VP and Chief Technologist at VMware. He also held positions as operating partner at US investment firm Cota Capital, and co-founded micro-fund Mission & Market and digital skills platform Cloud Academy, acquired in 2019. Quintarelli founded I.NET, Italy’s first internet service provider, which IPOed with a €1.9 billion market cap and was acquired by British Telecom, invented the Italian government’s public identity system SPID (now used by more than 38 million people), former chair of the Italian Digital Agency and advisor to the European Commission and the United Nations.
Alessandro Profumo joined the Rialto team as Chairman and Partner. As the former CEO of UniCredit, Europe’s second largest bank, Leonardo S.p.A, Italy’s largest aerospace and defence company, and Monte Dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, he will deploy his extensive network to support the firm’s portfolio.
Each GP is able to leverage their experience of building and exiting startups with billion-dollar outcomes, as well directly investing into over a hundred businesses returning highly successful exits, including Sysdig, Aumni, Eight Sleep, Truelayer, Replit and others. Both cofounders reside in Italy with the wider team based between Italy and the US.
Brunozzi and Quintarelli have personally invested into the fund. The team began fundraising in December 2022 and has already secured over €55M in funding to date, with a final close anticipated by mid 2025. Due to the team’s shared tech and entrepreneurial experience, as well as their wide network’s ability to assess potential investments, Rialto has been able to move definitively and at speed, often closing rounds as the sole investor.
Rialto is focused on supporting European founders operating in hard tech sectors which demonstrates domain expertise in recession-proof strategic verticals, such as developer tools, robotics, non-gen AI, cybersecurity, AR/VR, Enterprise SaaS, tech-enabled healthcare, and cloud services.A large portion of Rialto’s €100M target for ‘Rialto I’ has already been deployed, backing:
- Aidem, the privacy first demand-side platform for B2B online advertising
- K-Sport, the AI-driven performance monitoring platform for professional sports teams
- Keyless, the AI Biometric and Cybersecurity platform
- Medicilio, the medtech enabling access to quality healthcare diagnostics outside of hospitals
- Platformatic, the open source backend development platform
- Roboze, the high precision material science platform
- V-Nova, the advanced high-resolution video compression software provider
Rialto leverages their partners and advisors, including an extensive network with the Italian diaspora, to source their dealflow and to provide best-in-class counsel, opportunities, and introductions to the portfolio companies.
Rialto’s unparalleled understanding of Europe’s regulatory landscape further informs their ability to provide founders with guidance from a policy and economic standpoint.
Simone Brunozzi, General Partner at Rialto Ventures, said: “The best European founders look to the US to raise, starving European investors of breakout growth success. We act as a modern ‘consigliere’: we partner with Europe’s world-class talent before they make that jump. So, our LPs participate in exceptional success stories, and these founders gain from meaningful capital and guidance at an earlier stage.”
Alessio Lorusso, founder and CEO of Roboze, said: “Roboze is on a mission to use our precision manufacturing technology to reshape some of the world’s most demanding sectors. Rialto’s backing on this journey grants us the calibre of support we need. They’re true partners that can meaningfully advise and support us each step of the way as we build and scale our business, having already succeeded at each step of the journey themselves.”