OUR STORY
From a Community to a Fund: The Making of Italian Founders Fund
The story behind Italian Founders Fund
For years, talking about startups in Italy felt a bit like telling the same story over and over
again.
Plenty of talent. Not enough capital. Ambition that often had to leave the country to
find oxygen.
We have heard the story over and over again. After the dot-com bubble, venture capital slowed down, then almost disappeared. Startups still existed, but scaling them was hard. The ecosystem produced few outliers, not momentum. If you wanted to build something truly global, the default advice was simple: “move”. “You can’t do it from Italy”.
And yet, something interesting happens when a story is repeated for long enough...
People eventually get tired of it.
Around 2018, Italy started to change. Not loudly, not all at once, but consistently. A new wave of companies emerged, some built in Italy, others built abroad by Italian founders who hadn’t cut their ties. Capital started flowing again. International funds began showing up on cap tables. The headlines got better. Still, the real shift wasn’t visible in pitch decks or press releases. It was happening in WhatsApp groups, at late dinners, on weekend trips that somehow turned into informal board meetings. Founders started talking to each other. Really talking. About mistakes, not just wins. About hiring the wrong people. About fundraising gone wrong. About what they would do differently next time. And something else followed naturally.
They started investing in each other.
By 2022, it was no longer unusual to see seed rounds made up almost entirely of
founders. No big institutions. No elaborate processes. Just experienced entrepreneursbacking other entrepreneurs early, often before anything looked “institutional-grade”.
Many of them were second-time founders. They had scars. They had pattern
recognition. And they had a very clear sense of what matters at the beginning, and what
absolutely does not. This didn’t happen because someone designed it. It happened
because the ecosystem was finally mature enough to support it.
At a certain point, the need became obvious.
If this energy was real, it deserved structure. If this trust was real, it deserved a vehicle. Not to slow it down. Not to institutionalize it into irrelevance. But to amplify it. The idea was simple: create a vehicle that could channel this founder-to-founder momentum, while adding the discipline, governance and international standards of venture capital. A Founders Fund — built by founders, for founders. Same as around the world was already happening.
Same speed. Same directness. Same bias toward action. But with a full-time team dedicated to venture. People who understood term sheets as well as product roadmaps. Who had operated companies and navigated global capital markets. A structure strong enough to scale, without suffocating the spirit that generated it.
The first step was to find a home.
That’s when Koinos Capital SGR entered the story. Koinos wasn’t looking to “add venture” as a side experiment. It had already taken an entrepreneurial approach to private equity and was building a broader multi-asset platform. Venture capital was not a marketing extension. It was a natural evolution. What mattered most was alignment. A shared belief that entrepreneurship and institutional rigor are not opposites. That you can design rules without killing initiative. That you can build a serious platform without losing founder empathy. With that foundation in place, one crucial element was still missing. A team that spoke both languages fluently.
The community of top Italian founders was there. The institutional platform was there.
But to transform energy into one of the most ambitious European VC funds, it needed people who had seen venture work at scale.
Some founders in the community had already backed Lorenzo Franzi in previous ventures. He had been an entrepreneur, an angel investor, and later an investor at Global Founders Capital, Rocket Internet’s venture arm. He had experienced how venture capital operates in mature ecosystems, up close. And he was ready to return with a clear ambition: bring that mindset back home. Not as nostalgia. As strategy. A European experience returning to Italy — a new kind of “rientro dei cervelli”, driven not by circumstance, but by choice.
That was the moment everything aligned.
A founder community that already trusted each other. An institutional platform built for the long term. An investment team grounded in global experience. Italian Founders Fund did not start as a financial product. It started as an answer to a question founders were already asking: what would happen if we built the fund we always wished we had? This Substack is where we will share that journey. The thinking behind the investments. The trade-offs that never appear in press releases. The reality of building venture capital in a country that is finally finding its rhythm.
Italian Founders Fund was created by founders, for founders. We are writing this for the same reason we built it: ecosystems improve when people share what actually happens.
This is the beginning.
