Cents, an early-stage fintech startup, announces that it has closed a €1.15 million pre-seed round led by SICI (Sviluppo Imprese Centro Italia), through the Umbria Research and Innovation Fund, which operates through PORFESR 2014-2020 resources of the Umbria Region and also underwritten by 40Jemz Ventures, Apside – V, 50% owned by Intesa Sanpaolo and Digital Magics, the Fin+Tech accelerator, the programme dedicated to the growth of fintech and insurtech startups created on the initiative of CDP Venture Capital (Fintech & Insurtech Accelerator) one of the selected startups, and XEquity (X-Equity Venture Club) under FNDX’s advisory, along with a large pool of business angels. Founded in April 2021 by Riccardo Valobra and Alessio Mazzalupi, Cents aims to redefine the approach to both social and environmental responsibility and impact issues in corporate governance dynamics, making access to ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) frameworks and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) practices more immediate. “Cents was born from a clear idea: to connect companies and brands with the realities that operate in the third sector, so as to give people the opportunity to be an instance of change in the world, even in everyday life. This is the starting point for our vision,” Riccardo Valobra and Alessio Mazzalupi said in a statement the aspiration to create an integrated digital ecosystem that generates impact through every single digital transaction, anywhere in the world. Today, thanks to the support of some of the major players in the Italian financial scene, we are at the ideal time to pursue these goals. The growing attention of European consumers to assessing the impact of their purchases, and the need for large companies to respond to this evolution in order to attract, engage and retain their customers, opens up promising avenues for rapid growth and expansion.” Claudio Cardinale, co-founder and CTO of Cents, adds: “At Cents, we are developing the entire platform from scratch, starting from the collection of large volumes of unstructured data, i.e. big data, and then processing them through an artificial intelligence engine based on an in-house machine learning model. With our software, we want to enable business partners to streamline back-office operations, donation processing, and technical integrations with nonprofits and their projects, while optimizing donor-cause matching. All implemented on a cloud platform with serverless architecture, to ensure scalability and flexibility, even geographically. An extremely challenging engineering project, which will involve extensive research work, but which can represent a game-changer for all the realities involved and which we are sure will give us great satisfaction.”
Platform on an Impact-as-a-Service model
The startup will use the new financial resources to launch the first European platform based on an Impact-as-a-Service (IAAS) model, enhancing its technological development and improving its B2B (and B2B2C) offer with which it aims to support, through transformative partnerships, e-commerce, banks, credit unions and financial institutions, connecting them with more than 50 non-profit entities operating on a national and international scale. The goal is to allow these companies, through transaction systems, an easy integration of sustainability, social impact and CSR practices, together with a traceable and accountable development of their ESG, within the company’s core business, amplifying the involvement of communities and the relationship with the customer, allowing millions of people, in Italy and Europe, to to make a daily impact on the world. The capital raised will also allow the consolidation and expansion of the internal team, focusing on the grafting of managerial figures, as well as on sharing the values of responsibility that the company bears. The perspective between now and 2025 is to achieve rapid growth in the workforce, through the acquisition of strategic partners in Italy, aiming to achieve metrics sufficient to close a seed round within 24 months, in order to position the platform as a reference benchmark at European level. Finally, the work of expanding the already large number of non-profit organizations adhering to the platform, including: Telethon Foundation, Save the Children, Oxfam Italia, will be of particular importance, a process in which transparency will be placed in the foreground in the transfer of information material on the projects supported through the service, with the ultimate aim of overcoming any type of evaluation bias and allowing an increasingly precise matching between the initiatives and the values of the donors. Vittorio Gabbanini, president of SICI, says: “We are very pleased to have completed the investment of the Umbria Research and Innovation Fund in a young, innovative Umbrian company that supports companies in making their business increasingly sustainable and attentive to environmental and social dynamics, extremely topical issues that will play an increasingly strategic role in the near future. We are also very pleased that the project has seen the interest and participation of venture capital operators of primary standing whose know-how and network, together with that of SICI, will form a very well-assorted team with the founders of the company”.
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