Startup, from Northern Europe to Milan on the hunt

The season of events dedicated to startup. Ten years after the first law for startips in Italy, the problems of the Italian ecosystem are linked to market validation, which is still too slow. In short, we do not grow and die. But, ten years after the law that opened the doors to innovation, there is excitement and there are also investors. So much so that he arrived in Milan Tech Chill, Latvian format coming out of the borders of the Baltic republic for the first time.

In the frame of the Bocconi University, not new to hosting events of this kind, one was staged two days dedicated to innovative companies looking for contacts and investors. In addition to the usual well-known names of the startup ecosystem, larger companies have also appeared, such as Kairos fund. There was no shortage of foreigners, it seems were also the most active. This is a debut and the idea of ​​Tech Chill is to repeat next year.

Among the stands an acronym predominates: Saas (software as a service), declined in every nuance. Among the Italian startups, Katakem, born in Catanzaro. In the Calabrian capital, Manuela Oliverio, Marco Francardi and Luca Francarsi have developed a automated chemical reactor. “The idea is to relieve scientists of the more routine part of the work, which is done about the same as two centuries ago – explains to Wired the marketing manager Lorenzo Di Cataldo -. We departed by a robot that automates the manual work of researchers, cause of mental fatigue and mistakes. Through the same robot, for the first time in history, we can extract certain and clean process data with which we train our artificial intelligence which, when fully operational, will be able to suggest to chemists how to optimize development processes.“.

According to Di Cataldo, the reactor would be able to significantly speed up the time to market chemical and pharmaceutical products. “In addition to robots and AI, there are other cloud services with which we improve the lives of researchers in the immediate future: from automated warehouse management to avoid that researchers have to deal with the inventory to the self-compiled and immediately shareable laboratory notebook that replaces handwriting”, Explains Di Cataldo. The startup, he says, has accelerated at Berkley Skydeck, and will be the only one to fly the tricolor flag at the San Francisco Tech Crunch scheduled in California from 18 to 20 October.