How did the team manage this achievement?
Roberto and his tech co-founders (who actually quit their jobs to dedicate to DeRevolutione) worked on the beta product and the business aspects of it for a year before the first public presentation. Quite perfectionist, he wanted to be totally prepared for all potential criticism when starting to pitch and present DeRevolutione at different events, including at TEDx as speaker. "Especially in Italy where Venture Capitalists are relatively few and know each other, I always tried to earn the esteem of the startup scene and to maintain an excellent reputation." said the founder.
With a good previous track record in business and marketing, Roberto told the investors about the achievements he reached without spending a cent (mainly creating projects with strong impact obtained through unconventional marketing instead of financial investments), adding "Imagine what I can do if you give me one million euro! Because an investment can always accelerate the growth of a startup and open doors to larger markets, besides just being a validation of it."
This determination, previous success stories plus getting 50K users subscribed on the landing page of DeRevolutione in just two months seems to have convinced investors, and the team got 5 offers in the past 8 months, choosing Vertis SGR and closing the deal with them a few days ago. It was not an easy process to review and compare terms and conditions from different investors, and even with Vertis the negotiation process lasted 3 months "of up to 10 hours meetings and 50 emails per day to review and modify lots of conditions of a contract of hundreds of pages" from what the co-founders remember now as "fascinating times".
Now backed by this funding, as well as by a group of internationally experienced business angels from the internet sector that can provide valuable know-how (like Giulio Valiante and Michele Cassucci), Roberto, Fulvio and Antonio are preparing accelerate their growth, first on the Italian market and then on European one.
Why is August a good time for investments in Italian startups?
Usually not much is happening in August in business, as it is more a holiday month. But apparently in Italy there were serious investments going on, like this one and the 300K euro invested in Ploonge, that I previously covered here on my blog. Why is this...no idea though :) I guess just startups never sleep.
*DeRevolutione (DeRev) is a social platform that allows users to turn their ideas into revolutions in order to improve the world we live in. It gives to communities tools to amplify ideas bottom-up, like a crowdfunding tool, a petition creation tool, a system to collect proposals - which can be used in many fields ranging from politcs and research to entrepreneurship and art.
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