Italy’s innovative start-ups work hard to secure capital

Pierluigi Consolandi, a business graduate from Milan’s prestigious Bocconi University, had worked for multinational consulting companies for about eight years when he felt his own entrepreneurial itch.  

Surveying successful US start-ups, he was struck by the rapid growth of The Farmer’s Dog, which sells freshly-prepared customised dog food. Consolandi sensed an opportunity for a similar model in Italy, where devotion to pets has grown as human births have declined.

Across town, Marco Laganà, then working for a corporate catering start-up, was feeling the gaps in Italy’s pet food market personally after he adopted a puppy with digestive issues, forcing him to cook for his ailing dog at home. 

Introduced by a mutual friend, Consolandi and Laganà have together founded Dog Heroes, which now sells dog food freshly-made from meat and vegetables through their own digital platform. Its revenue in 2025 was €3.6mn, up from just €127,000 in 2020, their first year of operations. 

“The idea was to disrupt the dog food industry,” says Consolandi, the chief executive. “Italians are really keen on what they eat, on understanding the supply chain for what they eat, and we thought they could have the same approach with dog food.” 

Steeped in tradition and stifled by red tape, Italy has long lagged behind other big European economies in creating a nurturing ecosystem for innovative start-ups, and support for new ideas has often been hard to come by.

Yet ambitious Italian entrepreneurs — many with years of professional experience — are increasingly seizing opportunities for consumer-facing companies in new niche markets. They are also finding new sources of capital: from crowdfunding platforms such as Italy’s Mamacrowd, which has raised more than €360mn for projects since launching in 2016, to venture capital funds offering both money and valuable expertise. 

Dog Heroes’ founders began with an initial investment of €400,000 from a friend, then raised another €1mn from crowdfunding and other angel investors in 2021. Last year, they raised €5mn in a round led by Milan-based VC Partners SGR, which itself was founded in 2023 to invest in consumer-facing digital ventures, especially in Italy.

 “What we found in them was a real partner both in terms of the capital side but also the operations side,” says Laganà, Dog Heroes’ chief marketing officer, of the fund. 

Dog Heroes aims to hit €10mn in revenues in 2027; to launch a new platform, Cat Heroes, broadening its potential customer base in Italy’s €4bn pet food market; and later to export. “We are focused on strengthening our position in the local market,” Consolandi says. “As we grow and build a strong brand, we will also look for potential opportunities abroad.” 

Roberto Fantauzzi, co-founder and CEO of Rome-based Lux Entertainment, ran nightclubs for years before deciding to shift towards more family-oriented entertainment after his daughter was born. In 2019, he and a group of friends created their first immersive entertainment experience, “Let’s Fly”, made out of balloons and staged in a disused Rome bus depot. The installation drew 100,000 visitors in 40 days. 

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit a few months later, the groups spent lockdown planning new immersive installations. “In those two years, we created our company and a lot of intellectual property,” he says. “We were speaking every day about new ideas, and studying how to build each event.” 

In winter 2021, Lux unveiled “Christmas World”, which was set up in a park and was popular with families eager for diversion after nearly two years of restrictions. Other site-specific, immersive entertainment installations, “This is Wonderland” and the “Balloon Museum”, followed, combining monumental works, interactive environments and live performances.  

From just €3mn in 2019, Lux’s revenues grew to €93mn in 2025 with exhibitions held not just in Italy, but also Paris, several US cities and Singapore — from where the company is considering further opportunities in Asia. Its expansion was buoyed by a €5mn equity investment last year from Simest, a state-controlled financial institution helping Italy’s small and medium-sized enterprises to expand abroad.     

“They give you structure and another kind of mentality,” Fantauzzi says. “We started with being artists. Now in the real world of business, you need structure, process and a really incredible chief financial officer.” 

Mauro Della Vacche, co-founder and co-CEO of Pinsami, and co-founder Fabio Grillo have also wrestled with the challenges of rapid growth since launching their company selling packaged pinsas, a mix of wheat, rice and soya flours — a lighter, more digestible alternative to pizza base.

“Pinsa is quite well known by consumers — it’s a wave that is increasing every day and we are on top of that wave and growing with the market,” Della Vacche says. 

Della Vacche, who had worked for years in sales and marketing for food companies, recalls his wife’s dismay in 2018 when he announced he was quitting his consultancy work, and investing money they had saved to build a new family home to take a stake as an unpaid equity partner in the pinsa-making start-up. “She started crying,” he says.

But customers from Italy and beyond quickly warmed to the pinsas, which are sold partially-baked, ready for a final quick baking as the base of a warm meal.

Pinsami, which sells its wares both through supermarkets and its own website, had sales revenue of nearly €37mn in 2025 — about 20 per cent was from Italy and nearly 80 per cent from exports to about 40 countries, led by Germany, Poland and Norway and increasingly, the US. 

In 2021, Germany’s Capmont, a private capital investment manager, bought out Pinsami’s original financial investor, a local businessman in the company’s base of Reggio Emilia, taking a majority stake in the business. 

Della Vacche says he and his partner were approached by 19 different funds interested in investing in the company, and that they chose the German fund “because they agreed to leave us free to run the company without too much interference”. 

Yet that solid backing enabled Pinsami to secure the necessary bank credit to invest €31mn over the past three years on expanding production facilities, though the company is once again at full capacity.    

“Money is not the problem,” Delle Vacche says. “The problem is that sales are running faster than our capacity to expand . . . I only accept a new client if I am sure I can produce for them.”