Italian entrepreneur Alessandro Seina first stepped into the sharing economy over a decade ago, listing the family-owned Rome on Airbnb in a flat.
When his guests needed a place to leave their luggage for hours before or after their stay, Seina provided an office nearby for his brand design consulting. However, he soon realized that storing the bags was a chronic problem for other Airbnb hosts and customers.
Today, Seina is the CEO of LeanTeam. LeanTeam is the CEO, a digital startup co-founded with two friends. Its platform, Radical Storage, has over 10,000 locations in hundreds of cities around the world, allowing travelers to place somewhere and pay for a flat rate to leave bags for up to 24 hours.
Rather than capital-intensive storage lockers, the Lean Team will engage local businesses, from cafes and bars to grocery stores and hotels.
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“It’s an opportunity for them to put more customers at the door,” says Seina. “When customers arrive there, some merchants (for example) sit down and relax, order coffee, or look at the menu.
Starting operation in 2017 and riding on Covid Pandemic, the radical storage handles around 1 million bags a year, aiming to triple the network within three years. In October, it raised 7 million euros through Series A funding.
LeanTeam is the symbol of a new kind of burgeoning Italian digital startup that will shake up the way businesses are run in an economy that is generally considered to be deeply resistant to change.
Italy is one of the EU’s digital laguards, with only 45.8% of the population owning basic digital skills, down below 55.6%. Digital infrastructure is not much developed in Italy, but connectivity is rapidly improving, the report says.
But the founder of Italian technology startup says the pandemic is an inflection point, according to the Italian small business owner who has changed attitudes towards digitalization among consumers, especially young people, and has strongly preferred cash.
“People are getting more aware and used to buying and paying online,” said Pasquale Scopeliti, co-founder and CEO of sports-centric travel agency Sportit. Sportit’s biggest brand is Snowit, a digital marketplace offering skiers and snowboarders. In the Italian Alps, everything from lift tickets to ski schools, equipment and accommodation is needed.
Unlike the US, where large companies dominate everything with ski destinations, the Italian industry involves many small and medium-sized businesses.
“The Alps are very fragmented. There are many ski resorts. Inside the ski resort, there is one owner on the lift and another owner on the ski school,” says Scopeliti. “In the beginning, the most difficult thing was to persuade the ski lift so that you can sell the pass.”
The founder aims to expand to resorts in France and Switzerland, growing other platforms, such as bikes, for sports-centric field trips, for cycling holidays and tribara.
Young Italians are at the forefront of adopting digital services. Andrea Vitali, founder and CEO of ticket app TicketsMS, says that 83% of the roughly 5 million users are under the age of 34. Vitali, a 41-year-old club owner and event organizer, launched the app with frustration with the ticketing system.
“People were still used to traditional paper tickets,” he says. “But we saw an increase in online transactions, especially post-Covid.”
Marco Tricarico, co-founder of Fintech Switch, is seeing an increasing demand for services that help consumers analyze contracts for services such as energy bills or broadband, smoothing out provider switches.
Initially designed with digital native youth in mind, Switchcho finds favor with slightly older consumers, averages between 35 and 40 years old.
With a more dynamic startup ecosystem developing, investors are willing to put their money into technology. Start-up investors include venture capital funds, successful entrepreneurs and state-owned Cassa depositions run by Italian Ministry of Finance.
It appears that former jubilant foreign investors are also happy to bet on Italian startups. Mayfair Equity Partners invested 35 million euros in travel technology company Visaway last year. Bizawa offers a platform aimed at removing pain from corporate travel bookings and internal approval processes.
“Previously investors may have requested that they have a holding company in the UK or the Netherlands. To make it more clear. “Now these hurdles have been passed. There is no negative about establishing a company in Italy, not elsewhere.”
But Italy still poses challenges, particularly in sensitive areas, says Angelo Sergio Zamboni, co-founder of Jobtech, a digital stuffing agency that last year provided around 700 workers to its restaurants, retailers and services businesses.
“Italians have a large space to innovate, but there are many cultural and legal constraints,” he says. “We are lagging behind other countries in terms of access to capital, access to talent and lack of support from regulations.”
However, JobTech has earned workers their own salaries, but has raised 8 million euros of capital since it began in 2019, and Zamboni says it is seeing positive signs of Italian startups.
“We see people who want to innovate to guide our country into the next chapter,” he says. “Many founders have been successful. I hope more come.”
