A hospital’s medicine cupboard is an unlikely place to begin a story about venture capital. Yet IPSA, a company backed by Next4, makes the storage and distribution of medicines and medical supplies part of a connected digital system. The attraction is wonderfully plain: technology that helps a hospital keep track of things it cannot afford to lose. Innovation occasionally wears a white coat. Sometimes it looks like a trolley.
- Next4 combines investments with consulting, venture building and technology delivery.
- Buying WDA brought company-building expertise into the group; buying Heres added conversational AI.
- Its customers include founders, innovative SMEs and corporate teams trying to turn technology into a working business.
That practical starting point helps explain Next4 Group, an Italian innovation holding whose proposition stretches across several jobs usually bought separately. An entrepreneur might need investment, a commercial plan, a management team and a way into another country. A corporation might need help testing a new business. Next4 has arranged investment vehicles and operating companies around those connected needs. The organising question is whether a promising invention can become something customers actually use.
01 / A startup that acquired a different job
Next4’s early story contains a useful reversal. June 2021 fundraising coverage described a business born to produce digital-health software that had become a venture builder investing in other startups. The founding trio was Davide D’Arcangelo, Pierluigi Sassi and Angelo Paletta. Their company completed a €1 million capital increase and adopted the rather delightful description “metastartup”: a startup helping other startups grow.
The shift widened its ambitions beyond a single software product. Management development, market access and relationships with investors became part of the offer. WDA was already named as a collaborator in 2021. What followed was a gradual tightening of that relationship. By the end of 2024, according to WDA’s account, Next4 had formalised an agreement to acquire an initial majority stake in the venture builder.
02 / Buying the ability to build
The mechanics make the WDA acquisition more revealing than an ordinary announcement. Next4 acquired 51% through a capital increase, with an option to acquire the remainder by 2027. WDA described the valuation basis as five times forecast EBITDA for that year. EBITDA measures earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation. Linking the agreement to future earnings gave this startup-building business a distinctly conventional financial yardstick.
Published deal terms, rather than a disclosed cash purchase price.
WDA brought market validation, business-model development and fundraising support. Its March 2025 account reported more than 60 entrepreneurial projects across four years and three ventures of its own. Those are WDA’s figures, rather than a count of Next4 customers. Roberto Macina, who co-founded WDA with Mario Costanzo, joined the holding’s board; Valentina Iannucci took WDA’s operational leadership.
In June 2025, Macina became Next4 Group’s CEO, with D’Arcangelo moving to chairman. Macina had previously founded the queue-management startup Qurami. Here was a person accustomed to a very specific customer irritation taking charge of a company with a much broader remit. The leadership change fits the acquisition: operating experience had acquired a seat at the top of the investment holding.
03 / The cupboard explains the capital
Return to IPSA. In November 2022, the hospital-logistics company completed a €1.38 million investment round. Next4 acted as the proposing investor, activating €1 million from CDP Venture Capital’s Fondo Rilancio Startup. Next4 had already entered IPSA’s capital in May 2021. This was a portfolio-company financing, distinct from Next4’s own €1 million capital increase.
That distinction matters. Next4’s role includes connecting a company with another source of money, alongside taking an investment position itself. Its 2023 collaboration with Campus Bio-Medico SpA extended the model toward research-derived MedTech and digital-health businesses. The work sits between scientific possibility and commercial organisation: deciding which research can support a product, a team and a market.
04 / Three routes, with people attached
The current group separates investment activity into Tech, International and Greentech. Tech combines technology holdings with system integration in cybersecurity, AI and data, connected devices and smart infrastructure. Its published criteria favour companies consolidating or expanding industrially, with validated, scalable business models. In March 2025, Next4 announced the acquisition of Heres, a specialist in multilingual, multichannel conversational agents and generative AI.
Market, model, operating plan
Technology and industrial projects
Investment and market entry
A reading of the published offer, not a compulsory customer journey.
International focuses on cross-border development for deep-tech startups and scaleups, including direct investments, co-investment and fund-of-funds approaches. Greentech addresses renewable energy, efficiency and sustainable infrastructure, including the development and management of real assets. Consulting supplies business development, technology transfer, training and help with public financing. Next4 therefore occupies the territory where an investor, an innovation consultancy and a technology operator overlap.
05 / The customer comes before the cheque
In a March 2026 interview, Macina explained that the model had evolved through experience as a founder, investor and market participant. His diagnosis was specific: founders can concentrate on technology while the difficult transition is getting to market. A working product does not, by itself, establish a repeatable business. That observation helps explain why Next4 bought expertise rather than merely expanding its investment menu.
“Capital remains a component, but it is not the entry point.”
Roberto Macina · translated from Italian · March 2026
For a founder, the useful move is to bring a defined commercial problem: validating demand, organising growth or entering a new market. For a corporate team, it may be testing a business model or arranging research collaboration. The lesson readers can copy is the sequence: establish the customer need, specify the operating work, then choose the financing. The model makes particular sense when those tasks are entangled.
It demands discipline, too. Tech’s preference for validated models and International’s emphasis on market traction set a boundary around the proposition. A vague idea cannot acquire customer demand simply by joining a network. Founders still need to test assumptions and do the work. Next4’s interesting bet is that more of that work can happen within the same group, with fewer handovers between people who fund a company and people who help it function.