The perks of building within Vento Venture Building
Italian Tech Week has just wrapped up and with it, the latest cohort from the venture-building program, whose founders pitched their startups at Investor Day.
Who is Italian Tech Week for? We ask ourselves this question all the time. When we line up speakers. When we invite VCs and operators. When we think about the startups in our portfolio and the doors that might open in those three days. When we skim reports and charts about Italy’s tech scene and wonder what the next curve looks like.
So: who is Italian Tech Week for? And why do we run it?
ITW is for the people who are having an impact and for those about to. It is for the water that is already a wave hitting the present, and for the undertow of the next wave that will feed the ecosystem we’re contributing to build with our funds and with Venture Building.
Founders, present and future
This year, for the first time, founders from our Venture Building program pitched the companies they built during Season 4 on the stage of ITW. It was a rare moment: three minutes to show ambition, talent, and a company to top-tier VCs in town for one of Europe’s coolest tech event.
And yes, the Italian Tech Week it’s for them too, the teams of Qura , Clev , Orobi, Poelis , and Hisy, that distilled months of work, research, calls, validation, setbacks, wins, and sweat into a single pitch at Investor Day. A journey that began in January and broke the tape that day.
But what is Investor Day?
It’s the moment the program closes and the next chapter opens. Teams that make it through the checkpoints, get Vento’s investment ticket, build traction, and sharpen product all summer step into the arena: three minutes of pitch, then one hour of roundtables with investors to go deeper—market, moat, model. Easy and exciting as that. And this year was no exception. Investor Day arrived and flew by, opening doors for our founders and letting us smile with pride for the path they’ve run inside the program. Watching this batch head into the Italian ecosystem also nudged us to zoom out: how are things really going out there? What impact the startups born in Italy, ours included, are having? For that, the excellent Dealroom report presented on the ITW stage by Yoram Wijngaarde is a helpful lens.
About ecosystem’s ceilings
Zoom out for a second. Italian startups are on track to raise $1B+ again in 2025, even without mega-rounds, so momentum is real. Meanwhile, knowledge is compounding: hundreds of new founders now bring unicorn experience to the table, a bench that didn’t exist a decade ago. And yet we’re still catching up: by many measures Italy sits mid-pack in Europe, with room to climb. What does that tell us? That Italian startups aren’t strong enough? That our founders can’t play on a European or global stage? No. The quality we see each year from our investment activity and our venture building program says exactly the opposite.
Our take and a closing call
We don’t believe Italy lacks talent. We believe it lacked a platform where entrepreneurial talent can actually bloom. So we built one. Not a theater of slides or a factory of founders, but a place where ambition meets pressure and gets stronger. Where three minutes on stage are backed by nine months of the hard, occasionally boring, always glorious work of building. A place built to connect exceptional individuals, form strong founding teams, explore new problem spaces, and build high-potential startups from the ground up. The Dealroom report says there’s momentum and there’s a ceiling; our Vento founders say ceilings are there to be broken and they prove it, year after year, since we launched the program.
Applications for the new season are open: we’re looking for the next founders who want to earn their place on this stage, at this event, at this level of competition. If that’s you, and you’re smart, stubborn, and ready to take real risks, Season 5 of Vento’s Venture Building is for you. No idea or team is required. Bring talent, ambition, and the will to build something big, and let’s raise the bar together. Apply for Season 5.