Compri's first believers, before Compri existed
When I founded IFF in 2023, one gap in the Italian ecosystem kept bothering me. There was no real Entrepreneur-in-Residence program here, no place where a strong operator could find a partner willing to back them at day zero, before the idea or the deck or anything concrete existed. So we built one, and Edoardo Arbizzi was the first person through it.
When I met Edo he was a consultant at Bain, working on manufacturing and procurement projects after a stint in Ferrari’s commercial team, and he was tired of fixing other people’s companies. It became rapidly clear to me that he was a passionate entrepreneur inside, and one day I put the obvious question to him: why not move into our office and iterate on ideas together? At the time we hadn’t even done the first close of the fund. He took three months of leave, moved in with us, and started looking for something of his own to build.
One thread ran through his background. His family ran a packaging business, and he could see the same B2B digitalization wave that was reshaping every other industry heading toward it. Through Ascanio from IFF, he met another Edoardo, Edoardo Gava. The “Edis” were born. The two started trading packaging materials to test whether they could buy better than the companies already in the market.
They could, consistently, and yet almost nobody switched to them. Packaging was too small a share of any buyer’s total spend to justify the risk of changing supplier, so businesses stayed where they were even on worse terms. What stuck with them was the thing buyers kept saying: they were impressed that two outsiders bought better than their own teams. That was the real signal. The opportunity sat in the department itself: procurement was an understaffed, technologically neglected function inside companies that depended on it, and AI agents could elevate the whole of it.
A match made in heaven
Edoardo Gava turned out to be the missing half of the company. He is an engineer who had spent years close to manufacturing: first inside a Leonardo production plant, across production, purchasing and planning, then on operational-excellence work in consulting, before moving into venture capital with MIP, where he invested for five years and served as a fractional CFO for Smartness along the way. He had the technical and operational depth that Edo Arbi, coming from the commercial side, did not, and he had arrived at the same place: after enough time around founders, he wanted to build something of his own.
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Burning the boats
After taking leave of absence from Bain, a friend gave Edo Arbi the push he needed to fully commit:
“A good friend of mine told me I needed to burn the boats, trick myself into thinking I had no choice but to build something meaningful. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been as committed”
-Edo A.
In July 2024 Compri was officially born. There was no real product yet: the Edis were selling to procurement departments on a Figma file. One customer was convinced enough to put €20,000 on the table to sign against that Figma, a moment Edo still describes as slightly insane and the clearest early proof that the problem was real. The early traction and deep relationship we had developed with them made us lead their €1.6M pre-seed round alongside Dutch Founders Fund and a group of world class angels. Among them Giacinto Carullo (former CPO Leonardo), Enrico Giacomelli (Namrial), Gianluca Cocco (Qomodo), Luca Rodella (Smartness), Carl Tremblay (Plaid).
What Compri does
Compri builds supply-chain agents for manufacturers: digital colleagues that take over the back-office work a procurement team drowns in, both strategic and operational. The agents identify savings and run spend analyses. They compare quotes across a tender, read order confirmations for price, date and quantity, and match all of it against the company's own systems, updating them automatically. Connected to a company's ERP and email, Compri removes manual effort, keeps production fed with accurate data, and cuts as much as 10% of annual purchased spend, one of the strongest levers manufacturers have on margin, and one of the most exposed to today's geopolitical instability.
A €3.2M seed round to fuel growth
The bet has played out faster than we expected. Over the past year Compri quadrupled its customer base, from around ten to more than forty, across manufacturing, packaging, distribution and food, and grew ARR close to sixfold. The team went from twelve people to over thirty, the product is expanding into wider supply chain (finance, logistics, ESG), and the company now serves enterprises up to €5b in revenue.
Picus Capital leading this round is a strong signal of the great work done so far. They back vertical software with real conviction and keep funding it round after round, and manufacturing and supply chain sit squarely in their wheelhouse. They’ve written publicly about the need to digitize industrial supply chains and procure-to-pay, they already back software going into manufacturing operations, and they have operators on their bench who have run procurement and industrial functions at scale, including a former CFO of Bosch Mobility. They understand Compri’s customer because they have spent years studying that customer, and that is worth far more to the Edis than another name on the cap table. We’re excited to be joining the round and staying close to a team we know well by now.
Why we invested
People ask what we saw this early, and the answer is that we saw the founders before we saw the company. We backed two people who were willing to commit fully, sit with an unglamorous problem long enough to understand it properly, and turn a dead-end experiment into a real thesis. At day zero you are rarely backing the idea itself, since it almost always changes before it works, and what you are really backing is the people who will keep going until they land on the right one.
To the Compri team: congratulations on hitting this milestone. The road ahead is long and full of obstacles, but we know that you will have the grit to overcome them and build the generational company Compri deserves to be.
-Lorenzo
