Italian entrepreneur Alessandro Seina first stepped into the sharing economy more than a decade ago, listing a family-owned Rome flat on Airbnb.
When his guests needed a place to leave their luggage for a few hours before or after their stay, Seina offered the nearby office of his brand design consultancy. But he soon realised that bag storage was a chronic issue for other Airbnb hosts and customers.
Today, Seina is CEO of LeanTeam, a digital start-up co-founded with two friends as a solution. Its platform, Radical Storage, has more than 10,000 locations in hundreds of cities worldwide, where travellers can locate and pay for somewhere to leave bags for up to 24 hours, for a flat fee.
Rather than capital-intensive storage lockers, Lean Team enlists local businesses — from cafés and bars to grocery stores and hotels — that are willing to store bags for extra revenue and the hope of making extra sales.
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“It’s an opportunity for them to have more customers at the door,” Seina says. “Some merchants [say] when our customers arrive there, they sit, they relax, order a coffee or look at the menu. Our pitch [to partners] is that they can . . . convert our customers to their customers.”
Radical Storage — which began operations in 2017 and rode out the Covid pandemic — handles about 1mn bags a year, and aims to triple its network within three years. In October, it raised €7mn in Series A funding.
LeanTeam is emblematic of a new breed of fast-growing Italian digital start-ups shaking up the way business is done in an economy typically seen as deeply resistant to change.
Italy remains one of the EU’s digital laggards, with only 45.8 per cent of the population possessing basic digital skills — below the average of 55.6 per cent, notes a recent EU report. Digital infrastructure is less developed in Italy, though connectivity is improving fast, the report said.
But Italian tech start-up founders say the pandemic was an inflection point, altering attitudes towards digitalisation among consumers — especially the young — and Italy’s small business owners, who had a strong preference for cash.
“People became more aware and more used to buying and paying online,” says Pasquale Scopelliti, co-founder and CEO of Sportit, a sport-focused travel company. Sportit’s biggest brand is Snowit, a digital marketplace offering skiers and snowboarders all they need in the Italian Alps, from lift tickets to ski schools, to equipment and accommodation.
Unlike the US, where big companies monopolise everything at a ski destination, in Italy the industry involves many small businesses.
“The Alps are very fragmented — you have many many ski stations; inside the ski stations, the lift has one owner, the ski school has another”, says Scopelliti. “At the beginning, the hardest part was to persuade the ski lift to allow us to sell the pass.”
The founders aim to expand to resorts in France and Switzerland and to grow other platforms, such as Bikeit, for cycling holidays, and Tribala, for sport-centred excursions.
Younger Italians are at the forefront of adopting digital services. Andrea Vitali, founder and CEO of ticketing app TicketSms, says 83 per cent of about 5mn users are under 34. Vitali, a 41-year-old club owner and event organiser, started the app in frustration at ticket systems.
“People were still used to the traditional paper ticket,” he says. “But we have seen an increase — especially post-Covid — in online transactions.”
Marco Tricarico, co-founder of fintech Switcho, sees broadening demand for a service which helps consumers analyse energy bills — or contracts for services such as broadband — and smooths any switch of provider.
Initially designed with digital native youth in mind, Switcho is finding favour with slightly older consumers, averaging 35 to 40 years old.
A more dynamic start-up ecosystem is developing, with investors willing to put money into tech. Start-up investors now include venture capital funds, successful entrepreneurs and state-owned Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, run by Italy’s finance ministry.
Once-reluctant foreign investors also appear more willing to bet on Italian start-ups. Mayfair Equity Partners last year invested €35mn in BizAway, a travel tech company. BizAway offers a platform aimed at taking the pain out of corporate travel bookings and internal approval processes.
“Before, investors might have requested you to have a holding company in the UK or the Netherlands — to give . . . more clarity,” says Luca Carlucci, BizAway’s founder and CEO. “Now these hurdles have been passed. I don’t see any negatives in starting a company in Italy rather than somewhere else.”
But Italy still poses challenges, especially in sensitive sectors, says Angelo Sergio Zamboni, co-CEO and co-founder of Jobtech, a digital staffing agency, which last year provided about 700 workers to restaurants, retailers and service businesses.
“There is a huge space in Italy to innovate but there are a lot of constraints, culturally and legally,” he says. “We are lagging behind other countries in terms of access to capital, access to talent and lack of support from the regulations.”
Yet Jobtech — which puts the workers on to its own payroll — has raised €8mn in capital since it started in 2019, and Zamboni says he sees positive signs for start-ups in Italy.
“I see people wanting to innovate to bring our country to the next chapter,” he says. “Many founders are succeeding. I hope more will come.”