Fundraising announcements, and startup news in general, tend to highlight the big picture: amount, funds involved, what the company does, a blurb or two from the founders. That’s ok for getting a bit of buzz, but it doesn’t really help the coming crop of founders understand what it takes to get to that point. I want to give a closer look at what makes an investor - me, and more broadly, Italian Founders Fund - say, “Yes, I want to invest in this company.” Luckily, we have a number of portfolio companies to work with. This time, it’s JetHR’s turn: IFF’s first investment.
We sometimes forget that many clichés exist because they’re true. IFF’s first investment was in a company that aimed straight at one of those: running a business in Italy means dealing with a lot of bureaucracy.
JetHR was born to apply the benefits of software to painful processes that were complex, repetitive, and absolutely necessary for a business: the processes associated with hiring, managing and paying employees. Led by founders with entrepreneurial experience and an eye for problems, the company has grown quickly, by winning over customers (and keeping them from churning) and by raising with some of the top investors working in Europe: Vento / Exor Ventures and IFF from the early days, and more recently Base10 and Picus Capital in their most recent round of €25M.
How is the team responding to the pressures of product, growth, and expectations? In 2025 they hit €7.5M ARR, beating their internal predictions by €1M; they were named as a Great Place to Work Italia; and as they gain more experience in solving payroll pain points, they’re seeing opportunities to solve other critical HR/admin issues that have been plaguing Italian companies for far too long.
How did they get this kind of momentum? What happened before the term sheets - or even the first contracts - got signed? Here’s a look at what it takes to get all the way to closing an investment in a venture-backed startup.
A problem
Every company builder knows that it’s much better to start with a problem than a solution. But after you’ve decided on a particular problem, like Marco, cofounder of JetHR, did with the difficulties Italian businesses have long had with payroll and HR, you still need to figure out some sort of a solution that responds to that problem.
Once you’ve got that initial solution, a big distinction comes into play.
Namely, good entrepreneurs find the reasons why people buy their solution and push on those. Great entrepreneurs find the reasons why people won’t buy their solution and figure out how to use that information to build a great business.
Marco is in that latter group. When he was exploring the idea for what would become JetHR, he didn’t throw up a bunch of landing pages, trying to find an argument that worked. Instead, he had a different mindset: “Let’s go beyond the numbers, and find out why people wouldn’t ever buy this kind of payroll/HR solution.”
That meant going qualitative, not quantitative. He set up dozens of conversations with business owners and HR leaders, talking about their payroll pain points, the various details of those problems, AND why they wouldn’t be interested in changing how they were already doing things. As he tells it, “I didn’t let them say, ‘Oh, yeah, interesting, that’s a good idea.’ I pushed them to tell me, ‘So here’s why it wouldn’t really do anything for me.’”
That was what let him and Francesco, his cofounder, continue both to build a solution that worked and to understand who really needed it. It was information that let them speak much more reliably about the next big thing investors are looking at.
A market
Taking the time to really talk to potential customers was important, because given Italy’s well-deserved reputation for having a certain level of bureaucracy, it would have been easy to just say, hey, payroll’s a pain, let’s build a solution. There are lots of businesses in Italy (about 6 million!), payroll must be a big pain for all of them!
But Marco knew that out of all the “companies” in the country, there were a lot that were very small operations with a small number of employees; for them, a new payroll solution wouldn’t necessarily make sense. By going through those conversations, he developed a better idea of where the market was and why. This gave him a lot of credibility once he got into discussions with investors, as he was able to have a much more realistic grasp of the company’s go-to-market and growth potential, rather than just throwing up a chart marked “15M businesses in Italy” and acting like they all have the same administrative needs.
The solid, realistic foundation of “problem-solution-market” is why JetHR has become one of the fastest growing Italian startups the ecosystem has ever seen; and they developed it by focusing on the people first, not the KPIs.
(Don’t worry, the KPIs came later. And don’t get me wrong, they’re important. But most of the time, especially in early-stage companies, they won’t be incredible enough to give an investor that “Yes, we really want to do this!” feeling.)
A product
That kind of attention to detail is what you need to go from nothing to something. Being an early-stage entrepreneur isn’t the same as running a Fortune 500 company, and Marco & Francesco understand the extremely practical side of creating something new. What he and the team have been able to build reflects that practicality, and the result is why we at IFF and our larger Koinos Capital family are proud not only to be early investors in JetHR, but also happy users, alongside almost all of our IFF portfolio companies.
The JetHR experience also shows off one of the big things that, as we develop a healthier startup environment in Italy, is critical for budding entrepreneurs to understand: we’re a country of people that appreciate beauty, quality, craftsmanship. And the first version of any successful startup solution, the one that gets put into the hands of those first customers, is pretty much always… not that.
Marco’s upfront about it: “When you get down to it, JetHR is here to help you hire and pay people. Well, the first version couldn’t do anything on the hiring side. If our customers wanted to put someone new on, they had to send us an email. Given where things are now, digitally speaking, people are used to self-service, it’s embarrassing to tell your customer that! But my cofounder Francesco, who was doing most of the engineering and product design, told me that the payroll part was already so complicated, we just couldn’t do both at the same time. We needed to get that first solution onto the market. So I was out there selling something that, again, made me feel a bit embarrassed. But he was absolutely right, and what JetHR has become wouldn’t have happened if we’d just kept to ourselves, trying to make that first version something beautiful.”
Early-stage investors know it’s more important to get a product into the user’s hands and see what works and what doesn’t than spending months or years trying to invent the perfect “Woooow!” effect in the MVP. We expect the product to evolve, of course, but what we really want is an entrepreneur who can build, learn, iterate, and keep moving forward quickly.
A team
As the years have gone by, I’ve also been fortunate to have gotten to know Marco as a person as well as an entrepreneur. We first met when we were both on different entrepreneurial adventures, him at ProntoPro and me at Zipjet. But it was never just business: our kids are similar ages, and because we enjoy each other’s company we’ve had moments to hang out as families, not just business associates.
Having that kind of a full relationship is great, because despite what many people in tech (and elsewhere!) would like to believe, it’s impossible to have a huge difference between the personality they have at work and the one they have at home. And while we all know that the success of JetHR and IFF won’t be judged by how nice the people involved are, that doesn’t mean it isn’t important; perhaps what I’m trying to say is simply that it’s better doing business with people you truly admire in all facets of their life.
This goes beyond the relationship between founders and investors. In a conversation with Irene, another one of our IFF partners, Marco mentioned how important it was to him to know that his cofounder Francesco was someone he admired for his ethics and morals, because “in the hard times, and there are lots of them, it’s not really technical skill that’s going to get you through it.” For me, that’s something that I’d absolutely apply to Marco himself: I know that when he tells me something, it’s the truth. For me as an investor, that’s so incredibly important. We’re in a business with storytelling, it’s true, and that also means we’re in a business with a lot of storytellers. But it’s one thing to know that a founder might need to massage a story into something that speaks to people; it’s another thing to realize that you can’t trust them when it’s just the two of you in a room. And that’s one thing that I’ve never had to worry about with Marco.
By the way, how do you know they’re sincere? Ask the people who are lucky enough to be working at JetHR now, and they’ll tell you. The workplace satisfaction there is quite incredible, especially in Italy, and that kind of environment is a direct reflection of the personality the founders create for a company.
(That sincerity also helps in another way: Marco’s created quite a social media following on LinkedIn, not by constantly pushing one type of post, but simply by posting content that is important to him and that thus connects with people. In a world that’s being flooded by content, sincerity is becoming one of the most important qualities we can have online, and Marco has definitely understood that.)
An opportunity
A specific fund making a specific investment in a specific company comes down to having a lot of things line up. My relationship with Marco goes back to when we were both entrepreneurs building different companies, and grew over time as we moved from place to place. That relationship meant that we had opportunities to talk about JetHR before IFF was in place as a fund, and even before Marco and Francesco were ready to do their first fundraising round.
Then when they were ready to fundraise, I was still working to get IFF operational, which seemed to create a bit of a timing mismatch. Still, everything I was seeing when we would talk told me that I really wanted IFF to be involved with JetHR over the long-term. But I also know venture capital is competitive; with a great company like JetHR, there are lots of funds that want to be involved. Marco ended up being in the great situation of being able to choose investors, and was gracious enough to come up with solutions that took into account IFF’s own situation. So our being part of those rounds came down to that existing relationship, with the unique entrepreneurial value that IFF brings to the venture market in Italy being an extra argument that I wasn’t shy about using.
The full picture
When it seems like all of those various pieces can come together, there’s a whole new level of complexity that comes into play. An investment memo is researched and written, the investor presents the business to their partners, due diligence is performed, etc. But while all of those steps are necessary, and can indeed present their own problems, we don’t even get to that point without seeing that the fundamentals of a deal exist.
I’m very glad to have had JetHR be the first deal that made it over the line at IFF, and thank Marco, Francesco, and the rest of the team for their trust in us. If you’re building something that you think can be Italy’s next big thing, think about how your story would fit together with us, and reach out.
