Ep 07 | Marcello Tedeschi | Managing Director @Alchimia Investments talks about investing in Israeli Tech

David Debash (0:00)

All right, so welcome everyone to a new episode of Extraordinary Talks by Sarona Ventures, TechShield Edition, where we chat with extraordinary members of the high-tech scene from all over the world. Greetings from your host, David Debash, operating partner at Sarona Ventures.

Today, we take you a bit off the beaten path and take you to a country, which is Italy, which happens to be as well my country of origin too. It is well-known worldwide, but maybe not enough for their startup history and their high-tech strength throughout Europe. So, a warm welcome to a friend and a colleague, Marcello Tedeschi, managing director at Alchimia Investments, Italian VC.

Good to have you. Always good to have you. So, tell us more about you. Let's start with this and tell us more about Alchimia.

Marcello Tedeschi (1:01)

Of course. Thanks, David, first of all, for the invitation and thanks to Sarona. I think what you're doing gets great. So, happy to be here and to share a bit of our experience in the Israeli tech scene in the past years and my personal one. I come from a financial background, so M&A, consulting, traditional, let's say, financial background. But I always had the passion for the ecosystem of startups, both in Italy and abroad. I started with a nonprofit organization many years ago, funding it, and was meant to help Italian tech ecosystem to start because it was when the VC sector in Italy was basically unknown. That was back in 2012 And I started my career in VC with that experience. Then on one side, I started investing in Israeli funds and American funds with my family. And the other side, I started investing in supersede startups in Italy.

So I had the two angles of the market. One was very niche and very young, and the other one was quite broad and already pushing on requirements and international market.

Fast forward back four years and a half ago, an Italian entrepreneur called Paolo Barletta called me and said, hey, I have this vehicle that is called Alchimia Investments. We are active as direct investments VC company, both in Italy and abroad. What do you think about joining us and kicking off again a bit the strategy after the first period where there was a different team managing the company? I call it company because we're not a fund. We're a permanent capital investment vehicle, so it's a bit different from a managerial perspective.

In terms of objectives, it's quite the same. We look to invest, to divest, to give returns to our investors that are five Italian entrepreneurial families with strong Italian roots, but they always understood the need for innovation and they always seen that Italy was not enough for that.

So the imprinting of Alchimia was always to invest globally. This is how we also started to invest in Israel, actually, and then I know that we will jump into this later down the road, but just to give you a bit more details about Alchimia, we are a global investor. We have, as of now, approximately 25 portfolio companies with a total invested amount of 120 million euros, so we are very small for the international ecosystem, but if some of you know, the Italian ecosystem actually were quite well positioned in the top five layers, I would say, and we're probably the only one investing directly on a global scale. So happy to discuss about our strategy in Israel and how we act there.

David Debash (3:54)

Well, absolutely. Actually, I wanted to maybe have a bit of a background from you about the Italian ecosystem quickly. It's not something that the classic high tech geek would be aware of or be familiar with.

So you mentioned that there are a few VCs, I understand that the size of those VCs really varies, but most of the VC is focused in Italy or they focus abroad as well. How does the ecosystem looks right now in Italy? And if you would have to compare it to one even a few years ago, which one would it be?

Marcello Tedeschi (4:38)

So the Italian ecosystem is quite local, I should say, right now. So meaning that there are quite a number of small funds, but are meant to invest in the local ecosystem. This is because it started with the push from a governmental entity that is called GDP, the Cassa Depositia Prestigini, meaning the state-owned portfolio for private investing.

And it started with this push. And with this push came also the boundaries for the new funds and for created funds to invest in the local ecosystem in order to have public money invested. So, what happened here is that there was a bit of a...