CDP Venture Capital SGR, through the Technology Transfer Fund, which was established with an initial amount of 275 million euro, will invest in the entire technology transfer chain by establishing national hubs throughout Italy. Agreements will be made with leading universities and research centres to finance early-stage start-ups, and support will be given to sector-specific venture capital funds to foster the growth of the best companies on the market. A systemic approach that leverages the most promising opportunities in Italian research to create new generations of entrepreneurs and investors.

RoboIT is the first of these hubs and was established in conjunction with the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa with the involvement of:

• the University of Naples Federico II, the University of Verona, and the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, which are among the leading research centres in Italy specialising in the sector.
• Pariter Partners, an investment holding company that leads the first and only Italian syndicate network specialising in deep-tech and which will provide specialist services to researchers as well as being a co-investor in the initiative.
• Leonardo, an Italian multinational company involved in monitoring strategic technologies affecting Italy’s security, which will contribute its know-how in terms of both technology, including through Leonardo Labs – the central and cross-sector research infrastructure – and the market and in terms of the impact on industry.
• Eureka! Fund I – Technology Transfer, EUREKA! Venture SGR’s Venture Capital Fund, specialised in Science and Engineering of Innovative Materials, also applied to robotics.
• Cysero EuVECA, Venture Capital Fund of AVM Gestioni SGR S.p.A., a EUVECA Manager specialised in investments in Robotics.

Agreements are also being finalised with institutional entities and other companies that will supplement the 40 million euro investment already allocated by CDP Venture Capital and other specialised VC funds, with a total leverage estimated to be over 100 million euro over four years for the creation and development of over 50 new companies.

The RoboIT Hub will be based on a Hub & Spoke model, providing researchers with financial resources and specialist skills to carry out an initial technical and business feasibility study within the participating Universities and Research Centres (Spoke), followed by entrepreneurial acceleration services to support the creation of new national robotics champions at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa (the Hub).  The Hub will be located in the Valpolcevera area, a few metres from the new “Genova, San Giorgio” Bridge, where what is considered Europe’s first Robot Valley is being created. An important urban renewal project is currently underway in this area which has received considerable support from the Ligurian Regional Government and the Municipality of Genoa and which includes, starting from the IIT Robotics laboratories already present in the BIC – Business Innovation Centre (the incubator of the Region’s financial company), the planned realisation of a “Green Factory”, a unique integrated research, start-up development and acceleration centre.     

The industrial robotics and automation sector in Italy is developing rapidly and is a world leader for its competence centres with over 104 thousand companies (+10% in the last 5 years), 429 thousand employees and a turnover of about 5 billion euro in 2020. Today, there are over 615 start-ups and innovative SMEs in this sector  and over 6000 European patents in robotics filed in Italy in the last 10 years : a rapidly developing ecosystem within a global market that over the next 5 years is expected to grow by +245% in logistics applications and by +189% in the biomedical field .

“The creation of the RoboIT Hub symbolises the importance attributed to outstanding research and innovation,” said the President of the Liguria Region, Giovanni Toti. “We now need to capitalise on these resources, turning technology transfer into innovative companies with very high potential for expansion that will create jobs for future generations and boost growth in the region. The Region, also through FI.L.S.E., will support the Hub’s growth by implementing policies aimed at encouraging the incubation, acceleration and development of innovative start-ups”.

“Technology Transfer is an outstanding opportunity for our country, where scientific research is of extremely high quality and needs to be supported to foster the emergence of new start-ups and successful businesses,” said Enrico Resmini, Chief Executive Officer and General Manager of CDP Venture Capital. – Through the dedicated Technology Transfer Fund, CDP Venture Capital seeks to encourage this process by creating Technology Transfer Hubs that unite the leading-edge universities and research centres in the most innovative fields, promoting an exchange of ideas that will guarantee the possibility of transforming them into businesses, thanks to funding from specialised investment funds. RoboIT, which will be based in Genoa, is the first of these hubs whose aim is to guide the transformation of the most promising inventions”.
 
“IIT’s collaboration with CDP Venture Capital in the Technology Transfer Hub for Robotics, the first of its kind in Italy, is a concrete sign of support for one of the most promising areas of IIT’s research, which has already yielded significant results with robotics being applied in the health and industrial sectors,” – states Giorgio Metta, scientific director of the Italian Institute of Technology – “For IIT, the technological transfer of research to the market represents a total commitment that needs to be fuelled by ideas, capital and organisation in order to achieve tangible results. These elements are the essence of the Robotics Hub, for which we have made our scientific and technological expertise and capabilities available, together with our experience in technology transfer. This initiative will allow researchers from IIT and the other prestigious universities involved to transform their research in robotics into reality, transferring it to companies and ultimately to the market”.

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“Today there is still a wide gap between research and the market, in terms of both capital and skills,”  says Claudia Pingue, Head of the Technology Transfer Fund of CDP Venture Capital. “The ability to create a system between different players, aligning strategic objectives, working methods and cultures is also key to the success of the transaction”. 

The project to set up National Technology Transfer Hubs was born out of the need to bridge this gap, since they represent multidisciplinary and multi-player platforms capable of guaranteeing research to be verified, tested, incorporated, experimented on real business processes and scaled on an international level. 

“Technology transfer is one of the keys to bringing sustainable innovation to the entrepreneurial fabric and to solving the most pressing problems of the coming years, from energy transition to social inclusion”, continues Pingue. 

THE FIRST HUB ACTIVATED BY THE TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER FUND, ROBOIT, IS DEDICATED TO ROBOTICS. ITALY IS AT THE FOREFRONT OF THIS FIELD, JUST THINK OF THE FAMOUS IIT ICUB OR THE MORE RECENT BIO-BOTS, WHICH BEHAVE LIKE PLANTS. HOW WILL THE HUB OPERATE? AND HOW CAN IT GENERATE A CONCRETE IMPACT?

“Italy is among the top countries in the world in terms of research in robotics”, says Pingue, “and has a quality industrial fabric. Hence the objective of the RoboIT Hub, which aims to boost the competitiveness of a sector in which Italy can consolidate a strategic role in global supply chains, precisely through the set-up of new innovative companies that are capable of supporting innovation even in the pre-existing entrepreneurial fabric”.

The areas in which the Hub will operate range from:

• industrial robotics, linked to the automation of industrial processes,
• going through service robotics, linked to cognitive learning ability and to sensory capacity that make it capable of dialoguing with the outside world and that allow its use in high added value professional fields, such as surgery and agriculture.
• Finally, we must not forget domestic and personal robotics, which touches our most private sphere and which, as Pingue points out, “will impact each and every one of us, one need only think that it is estimated that 1 in 10 Americans will have a humanoid robot at home in 5 years’ time”. 

LIKE ALL CDP VENTURE CAPITAL INITIATIVES, THE NATIONAL ROBOTICS HUB ALSO GOES BEYOND THE LOCAL SPECIFICITY AND AIMS TO CREATE A SYSTEM BETWEEN THE UNIVERSITIES, ENHANCING THE SKILLS OF THE INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH CENTRES. 

“The RoboIT Hub is the first national technology transfer project distributed across the territories”, says Pingue. “Our aim is to create a financial infrastructure supporting the entire funding cycle of a technology, starting from research laboratories all the way to the market, and bringing together the skills of researchers with entrepreneurial and business skills”.

Four  Research Centres are involved in the project:
the Italian Institute of Technology of Genoa, which holds the international leadership on these disciplines and which will act as the Hub for the entire project;
and the University of Verona, specialising in the study of human-machine interaction, the Università Federico II of Naples, specialising in production and aerial drones, Scuola Superiore di Sant’Anna di Pisa, specialising in surgical and precision robotics.

One investment holding:
Pariter Partners which co-invests in the Hub and has the role of supporting researchers with specialised services in the process of approaching the market.

“We operate with a dual investment logic: we intervene directly to support researchers in the initial feasibility studies and we support them right from the start in understanding the potential market impact of their inventions”, says Pingue. “In the subsequent investment phases, we use an indirect intervention logic (Fund of Funds) to encourage the emergence of highly specialised venture capital operators who guarantee greater capital distribution capacity and help strengthen the innovation ecosystem” . 

In the case of RoboIT, reference is made to investment in major players such as Eureka! Fund I – Technology Transfer, EUREKA vc fund! Venture Sgr, specialising in science and engineering of innovative materials also applied to robotics, Cysero, a vc fund of AVM Gestioni Sgr EUVECA manager, specialising in robotics investments in addition to the participation of Leonardo as an industrial partner.

Capital, skills, industrial structures, to accelerate innovation in Genoa’s Robot Valley. But we mustn’t forget all the research carried out outside the circuit of the 4 main channels, since “RoboIt is open to the entire research system. Any spin-off produced by any university can apply for funding: the time has come for science, industry and capital to form a system”. 

BUT IT ISN’T JUST ABOUT ROBOTICS. WHAT ARE THE OTHER DEEP TECH FRONTS DESTINED TO PRODUCE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES FOR THE MARKET, DESPITE THE LONGER LEAD TIMES COMPARED TO ALREADY MATURE SECTORS, SUCH AS DIGITAL OR E-COMMERCE?

“Environmental sustainability, life sciences, agritech, artificial intelligence and aerospace: these are the sectors that we have identified as having the highest market potential and playing a strategic role for the Italian industry”, says Pingue. 

And the ingredients for scaling the RoboIT Hub approach to other sectors are clear: the ability to cooperate between the public and private sectors and “competent and courageous capitals, which come in and give an entrepreneurial boost to the project”. 

On the other hand, it is now clear that the most important global challenges cannot be solved without science: “universities and research centres play a key role”, Pingue reiterates, “and industries increasingly need innovation to win the challenge of sustainable competitiveness: participating in the Hubs provides them with this very same opportunity”. 

An opportunity to be replicated on a large scale, because only with shared, multidisciplinary and multi-player projects we can support the development of innovation in strategic fields for our country.