- P101 SGR has joined forces with seed investor PranaVentures, forming what they call Italy’s first venture capital consolidation deal. Together, they now manage over €600 million in assets.
- The new platform helps startups at every stage, from pre-seed to international growth. This kind of integrated approach is still rare in European venture capital.
- Lisa Di Sevo, founder of PranaVentures, says AI has reduced early-stage capital needs by up to 70%. This shift is changing seed investing and making scale even more important.
When Lisa Di Sevo started PranaVentures in 2021 with about €40 million, the venture required a significant initial investment to launch a technology startup. Four years later, she notes this requirement has dropped substantially, profoundly impacting early-stage investing.
Di Sevo says artificial intelligence has reduced early-stage capital needs by up to 70% and accelerated execution by 8x. This change led PranaVentures to join with P101 SGR, creating what they call Italy’s first VC consolidation deal and a platform with over €600 million under management.
Why consolidation, and why now
Even though it might seem surprising, when AI lowers the cost to start a company, investors who move fast and offer more than just money gain an edge. Helping with operations, follow-on funding, and strong networks becomes just as important as the first investment.
This trend is changing the European VC market. PitchBook’s Q1 2026 European Venture Report says experienced managers are closing more funds than last year, but new firms are down 18.6% from 2025. Also, 35.3% of funds closed in Q1 were smaller than before, the highest in ten years. Investors now prefer bigger, specialised funds, while smaller generalist funds are disappearing.
Italy’s venture capital scene has similar issues. In 2025, fundraising totalled almost €400 million across nine funds, down 13% from the year before, and no single fund raised more than €150 million. The same report shows that local investors accounted for 71% of the capital, with European and North American investors accounting for 19% and 4%, respectively. In this situation, building a bigger, more institutional platform is necessary.
P101 SGR, started by Andrea Di Camillo in 2013, manages assets through nine investment vehicles. Over 12 years, it has made about 300 deals and 23 exits, investing nearly €250 million in over 60 companies. PranaVentures, founded by Di Sevo with about €40 million in backing, has built a portfolio of 20 companies and made over 50 deals, including three exits, since 2021.
After the merger, Di Sevo and Guido Giordano will keep leading the seed strategy, continuing the firm’s original approach.
“The integration of PranaVentures marks a significant milestone in P101’s growth strategy. It strengthens our position in seed investing and lays the foundations for a new venture capital model in Italy, one that combines scale, expertise and international networks to support entrepreneurs throughout the entire company-building journey, from inception to global expansion. The market increasingly requires stronger, more specialised and better-capitalised platforms capable of competing at a European level,” Di Camillo says.
A €100 million fund for the new era of AI-driven startups
To put the new model into action, the platform launched Prana101, a €100 million fund for pre-seed and seed investments in Italian and European tech startups. The first close is planned for the end of 2026. The fund looks for founders working with artificial intelligence, next-generation digital infrastructure, and business or consumer software.
Di Sevo calls this focus “the new agentic era,” meaning AI systems that can handle multi-step tasks on their own.
If they reach their goal, the platform’s nine funds could manage €700 million in total. Di Camillo also wants to eventually manage more than €1 billion in assets.
Together, the portfolio has over 80 active companies that made about €2 billion in revenue in 2025 and employ more than 5,500 people. P101’s investors include the European Investment Fund, Azimut, CDP, Compagnia di San Paolo, Banco BPM, Sella Direct Ventures, Unicredit Banca, Cassa Nazionale di Previdenza e Assistenza Forense, Enpam, Inarcassa, the ISP Group Pension Fund, and several of Italy’s top entrepreneurial families.
Di Sevo was direct about why this moment demands a different approach, saying in a press release: “Artificial intelligence has fundamentally reshaped the economics of company building, reducing the capital requirements of early-stage startups by up to 70% while increasing execution speed by as much as eightfold. In this new environment, speed of decision-making and operational efficiency have become as important as access to capital.”
Italy’s structural gap and the need for scale
This deal is ambitious, but Italy still faces big challenges. Even though it’s Europe’s fourth-largest economy, per person VC investment in 2025 was just €127, the third lowest in Europe, ahead of only Greece and Slovenia. France and Germany each raised almost four times as much VC money as Italy did in the last ten years.
In 2025, Italy received nearly €500 million in AI and machine learning investments, more than double the 2024 levels, but still far behind France at €3.7 billion and Germany at €3.3 billion.
The gap is even bigger at the growth stage. In 2025, Italy had about 53 Series A rounds but only 14 Series B rounds. This creates a bottleneck that stops early-stage progress from turning into large European companies. The P101-PranaVentures platform aims to fix this by investing from pre-seed and staying involved through later rounds, rather than leaving at Series A.
Seed investing in Europe remains highly competitive. Cross-border funds like Speedinvest, Seedcamp, and LocalGlobe have strong brands and large portfolios that national funds struggle to match. P101’s plan is to provide startups with hands-on help with technology, finance, and go-to-market, plus additional follow-on funding. This way, they hope to be a better choice for Italian and European founders than funds that only offer money.
It’s not yet clear whether this consolidation model will work in other parts of Italy’s divided VC market. But as European investors look for larger companies with clear paths to profitability, smaller funds are under greater pressure to grow or merge.
The P101-PranaVentures deal might be the first of its kind in Italy, but it probably won’t be the last.
