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For crowdfunding platforms, 2023 was a significant year because it saw the entry into force of the new European Crowdfunding Regulation (ECSPR), which made the concept of a European market for this type of initiative more concrete, effectively breaking down the barriers between the different EU countries.
The new regulation, active since November 10th, has come to fruition not without some stomach aches, as we wrote here , but it is now a reality and so the platforms that have obtained the new authorization are now in full development from a continental perspective. This means that Italian investors will have a European audience of startups at their disposal and Italian companies will have to work hard to attract foreign capital, all with uniform and shared rules. “This is a very clear signal on how the innovation market is maturing and we are perfectly aligned,” explains Lorenzo Ferrara, president and co-founder of Open Seed, an investment vehicle founded in 2016, with the aim of selecting and supporting startups with high growth potential.
The partnership with Styleit
In the last ten years we have witnessed the birth of startups that set Italy as the exclusive market in which to operate, today this provincial conception of innovation no longer makes sense, it is necessary to open up to contaminations and comparisons with foreign countries and look for new opportunities where these arise. «Although it is strongly rooted in the territory, we remember that Open Seed was born in Florence by a group of local entrepreneurs, we have been working for a while to become a full-fledged international platform. This has a dual purpose: to offer new business opportunities to our 350 members and to help our 30 accelerated startups grow beyond the country’s borders.” With this in mind, Open Seed has signed a partnership with Styleit, in which it has invested 100 thousand euros. Styleit is one of the acceleration programs headed by CDP Venture capital, in particular the one dedicated to fashiontech, is based in Florence, and has Startupbootcamp and Gellify as other partners.
«Styleit is a clear example of a project that was created to bring Italian innovation related to fashion to the world, but there is more to it than that. We have opened another front of collaboration with Exceptional Ventures, a London-based venture capital firm that invests in early-stage startups from all over the world with a high impact in the field of environmental sustainability.” Ferrara adds.
Not only Europe
The fact that Europe and the world are the field on which our ecosystem is now called upon to confront itself is also demonstrated by the many initiatives in this sense that the most enlightened companies are already carrying out. In Silicon Valley, for example, “Casa Toscana” has recently been inaugurated, a space to support and promote the region’s entrepreneurial initiatives and bring them into contact with an immense market such as the American one. “We are in dialogue with the Tuscany Region to collaborate on the next mission in June, but already now, some of the 20 startups that flew to San Francisco in December as part of the project are companies in which we have invested,” says Ferrara. A very important change is taking place for our innovation ecosystem and we absolutely cannot afford to ignore it because the stakes are really too high. As Open Seed, we have set ourselves the goal of focusing all our energies in this direction. We have recently reopened the company’s share capital to support initiatives of this type. In particular, with the funds we are raising we will further strengthen our presence within the Styleit project and we will continue to focus on international realities. I am convinced that our country deserves to be an active and integral part of the European system.”
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