Up to €20 million is what the startup studio Startup Bakery aims to raise with the launch of the new collection campaign, with the first goal set at €3.5 million. The funds will be earmarked to support the development and growth of the next generation of sustainable B2B SaaS startups with a strong AI drive, 10 in total, the first of which is the already launched EsgMax.
“Investors who participate in our Labs become part of every initiative from the initial pre-seed phase, managing to secure a 25% stake. Subsequently, they also participate in the initial funding round. Finally, they are aware that there will be an initial liquidity event of about 6 million euros and a final liquidity event that aims for about 20 million euros, over about 6 years, guaranteeing a return of about 10 times the investment for each initiative,” Alessandro Arrigo, CEO and co-founder of Startup Bakery, said in a statement We are currently raising funds for our second investment vehicle, Startup Bakery Lab 2, which is dedicated to the 10 new startups in our portfolio. The first of these is EsgMax, already launched and supported by the Zucchetti group, as per the traditional business strategy of Startup Bakery, for which an exit agreement has already been signed. By closing three more deals like this, we expect to achieve returns in excess of three times the investment, a performance that only 5% of VC funds in the world can achieve.”
To date, Startup Bakery has invested and launched four startups: Veterly (2021, pettech, 530 thousand euros raised); Condeo (2022, proptech, 920 thousand euros raised); Sencare (2022, healthtech, 500 thousand euros); EsgMax (2023, sustainability, €800,000 raised and exit agreement for February 2025).
“To better support our initiatives and facilitate their journey, we have decided to centralize fundraising. For this reason, SB Lab 2 can exceed 3.5 million and reach up to 20. The more we raise, the more funds will be released for our best-performing initiatives,” adds Arrigo Thanks also to the transaction on EsgMax, we have already received interest from investors to enter SB Lab 2. We are happy about this and being practically at the beginning of the harvest we will have no problem making them participate. However, we will probably change the conditions after the summer, to protect investors who believed in our model even before it began to produce results”.
The contexts in which Startup Bakery usually operates are those that are still not very digitized, characterized by a significant gap in the use of data, where even a small dose of innovation can generate significant returns for the entire sector, with tangible benefits for society. The solutions thus created are all sustainable and related to at least one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and are mainly B2B SaaS solutions, integrated with elements of artificial intelligence.
Sustainability and technologies
The Firm can count on its experience in AI practices involving machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), conveyed at a technological level in the proprietary QuSeed solution, which supports the Firm in identifying what in finance are called weak signals from the world of innovation. Available from April in the new conversational release and also on subscription to third parties, QuSeed cross-references financial data from business databases (now Crunchbase) with conversational data from the network (news, blog posts, social posts, etc.), allowing you to intercept emerging needs and new trends from the most advanced markets.
“QuSeed works in English and this is definitely a competitive advantage,” says Angelo Cavallini, COO and co-founder of Startup Bakery . It is not intended to replace investment managers but rather to provide them with decision-making support. In fact, the most up-to-date information is often found in online news, rather than in company databases, which can only be updated after several months. The final evaluation is always entrusted to the intuition of Startup Bakery’s experts, supported by the team’s experience and empirical evidence”.
In any case, business and exit opportunities are evaluated by technicians, entrepreneurs and investors: the latter are able to exponentially multiply the exit opportunities for startups thanks to their network of relationships. In fact, if in the classic venture capital path startups grow mainly thanks to the financial contribution, in the Startup Bakery path these They are growing mainly thanks to industrial partners. An asset that has recently been structured in the newborn Bakers Club, thanks also to the entry of Margherita Colaceci as investor relations manager: a useful environment to create networking opportunities, keep investors updated and provide negotiation tables for startups.
Finally, through the Delivery Service and the appointment of Guido Pezzin to lead its development, the Firm has begun to make some components of its startup production chain available to third parties: from the identification of needs to the automation of processes up to the effective constitution of a team, the validation of the business idea, the development of an MVP, the scouting of co-founders, the implementation of concrete and effective artificial intelligence, the adoption of agile product development processes.
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