italy
(11)
SEMA knows what to do with a castle
In Campania, SEMA turns local knowledge into identities, exhibitions, websites, and reasons to visit. Its most revealing work begins with things a place already has.
GMG Group and the business of making business work
For 30 years, the Rome consultancy has connected strategy, finance, audit and legal expertise. Its proposition comes into focus where a growth plan meets the everyday work of running a company.
Nana Bianca is growing startups in a Florentine granary
Three veterans of Italy’s internet industry turned their experience into a place to build companies. At Nana Bianca, the offer runs from a €20 desk to startup grants of up to €100,000 - with some hard lessons between the two.
Area Science Park puts a laboratory in the startup cheque
In Trieste, a public research organisation pairs funding with access to microscopes, genomics and computing. Its bet: give difficult ideas the equipment and expertise to prove themselves.
XCALLY
Streamline customer interactions with AI-driven Omnichannel software
Doxee
Built for humans. Powered by AI. The Modena software house turning billions of boring bills, invoices and statements into communications customers actually open.
Davide Asnaghi
Davide Asnaghi is the co-founder and CEO of Diode Computers, a startup rebuilding how printed circuit boards are designed and manufactured. An Italian-born engineer trained at UC Berkeley, he spent years building hardware at Apple's Special Projects Group and medical-device companies before starting Diode to replace legacy EDA tools with open-source, AI-friendly software: a Python design language backed by a Rust compiler that turns requirements into manufacturable circuit boards in a fraction of the usual time. Diode raised an $11.4M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and partners with Anthropic to make Claude a more capable electrical engineer.
SORINT.lab
SORINT.lab is a multinational, vendor-neutral 'Next Generation System Integrator' founded in Bergamo, Italy in 1985. With roughly 1,500 engineers across 17 offices in Europe, the USA and Africa, it helps over 100 large organizations run and modernize their IT through DevOps, CI/CD, cloud adoption, application modernization, next-generation IT operations and site reliability engineering. The company is a notable open-source contributor (Agola, Stolon, Ercole, Sircles) and runs on a flat, holacracy-style 'Sircles' organizational model.
Dino Dina
Dr. Dino Dina is a Genoa-born physician-scientist who spent 15 years building Dynavax Technologies as its President and CEO, shepherding the company through the long road toward HEPLISAV-B, a two-dose hepatitis B vaccine whose CpG 1018 adjuvant technology later became a cornerstone of global COVID-19 vaccine programs. Before Dynavax, he built the Vaccine Group at Chiron Corporation and led Chiron Vaccines to the first-ever approval of an adjuvanted influenza vaccine in Italy. Since retiring in 2013, he has poured equal scientific rigor into his Cimarossa estate on Howell Mountain, Napa Valley - 60 mountain acres of vines and 1,200 olive trees named for the Italian phrase meaning 'red hilltop.'
Douglas Leone
Douglas Leone is an Italian-born American billionaire venture capitalist and former Global Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital, one of the most storied VC firms in Silicon Valley history. He joined Sequoia in 1988 after stints at Sun Microsystems, HP, and Prime Computer, rose to Managing Partner in 1996, and led the firm's global expansion into China and India. With investments spanning ServiceNow, RingCentral, Nubank, Medallia, and Wiz, Leone helped shape the modern cloud and enterprise software landscape. He stepped back from the senior operational role in 2022 but remains a general partner. As of late 2025, his net worth is estimated at $10.8 billion.
Luca Rossi
Luca Rossi is an Italian software engineer, entrepreneur, and writer based in Rome who turned a side project into one of the world's most-read engineering leadership newsletters. After co-founding and scaling travel startup Wanderio to 25M+ customers over eight years, he launched Refactoring in 2020 - a newsletter covering engineering management, software teams, and tech leadership. It now reaches 172,000+ subscribers, ranks in the top 10 Substack business newsletters, and generates approximately $300K/year in revenue, all operated solo. He also hosts the Refactoring Podcast, featuring guests like DHH, Kent Beck, and Camille Fournier, and in 2025 released Tolaria, a free open-source macOS knowledge base app built entirely with AI coding tools.