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Italy gets its first unicorn as Scalapay raises $497M from Tencent
- jd115 5y agoHere, let me correct the naive title for you: "China gets its first Italian unicorn"
- simonebrunozzi 5y agoTo be fair, the first "tech" Unicorn was I.Net in year 2000. At the time of IPO it was worth ~€1.5B. The term "Unicorn" hasn't been coined yet back then. Source: my business partner was the co-founder of I.Net.
- gpderetta 5y agoThe rest of the article qualifies the statement with a "since the dotcom boom". And BTW, congrats although 20 years late :)!
- N19PEDL2 5y agoAFAIK Yoox is the first Italian unicorn after the dotcom boom.
- kome 5y agotrue. YOOX is totally a unicorn. and before the boom: tiscali.
- lnxg33k1 5y agoAs italian with a direct experience both times with it, I think Tiscali is an order of magnitude better now than when it was a unicorn, maybe these investements require profits so that companies need to cut on quality?
- kome 5y agosorry if i'm totally misinformed, but isn't tiscali on the verge of bankruptcy? the stock looks really really bad: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TIS.MI/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TIS.MI/
- lnxg33k1 5y agoI wasn't aware of that, I was speaking as a user, maybe they're having an hard time to re-conquer customer's trust, but right now their connection is quite stable and fast
- slumber86 5y agoAlso Prima.it has got 1B+ founding a couple years ago. Unicorns in Italy are rare but are some.
- ABS 5y agoPrima raised $100+M in their Series A in 2018, I don't think the official valuation was ever disclosed
- captaincaveman 5y agoSounds like there is a story in here, so what happened to I.net?
- ABS 5y agodepop was funded in Italy, in an Italian incubator/accelerator, and moved the HQ to London a year later after getting seed investment from Italian investors so could be argued to be an Italian unicorn of sort. But before depop I'm not sure why people keep ignoring/forgetting about YOOX?
- s_dev 5y agoNot that comfortable with Tencent starting to acquire up so many European digital companies. I'm not sure profit is their only motivation here. I feel like in a decade us Europeans will be sitting around wondering why we sold off promising startups to China like we did US tech companies the previous decade.
- ABS 5y agoTencent co-lead and invested in the Series B round, it didn't "acquire" Scalapay
- Lascaille 5y agoSemantics aside that differs how?
- ABS 5y agofrom "a lot" to "massively" depending on the terms
- s_dev 5y agoI'm not sure what distinction you think you're making. They bought a lump of the company at whatever valuation and that's termed an "investment". However my point is that I don't suspect they're strictly after a return on investment here.
- ABS 5y agono, they very explicitly co-lead the round with Willoughby Capital and the participation from Tiger Global, Gangwal, Moore Capital, Deimos, and Fasanara Capital. Buying something to own/control it and investing in something for an expected future return are very, very, extremely different things and even more so in this context. Both formally (terms and conditions signed by all the parties involved, and there are many here and it's Series B, the clauses regarding equity, control, debt, exits and so forth) and practically.
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- jph 5y agoCongratulations Scalapay! IMHO Italy has a significant startup advantages, thanks to plentiful infrastructure in the cities, a dynamic culture that combines creativity and processes, and a sizeable economy. I recently visited Milan-Florence-Rome and these feel to me very much like the startup scene in San Francisco in the mid-1990s, ready to grow fast and big. I believe the missing ingredient is more VC startup ecosystem help, from incubators through Series A. If you're interested in this area, I'd love to connect because I see opportunities to grow the talent and money in Italy instead of having it leave for London & NYC.
- qsort 5y agoHonestly our insane taxation is holding us back. My salary is embarassing, but it's not even the company's fault, I'm costing my company ~2.5x what I make. The job market is perma-bearish and has been so since before I was even born.
- okokwhatever 5y agoamen
- kfk 5y agoTaxes are a problem but the work culture is also an issue. I tried to setup shop in Italy last year and it was... a mess. People not joining calls, broken English, a very concerning lack of trust in general from job candidates. I was offering market or higher than market wages. I ended up hiring more in our base in Krakow. It's getting harder to find people in Krakow but the work culture is on another level and English good across the board. Net IT salaries in Poland are more or less comparable to Italian ones, the overall cost difference is max ~20% for senior roles, so yeah taxes, but not enough to explain the "hold back" honestly.
- withinboredom 5y agoThe work ethic in Italy is … interesting. In my experience, they get their shit done when they say it will be done, not when you say it should be done. They enjoy time with family, and time away from work (when I say enjoy, I mean they will make time for it, even in the middle of an American defined work day). I’ve never had an issue with the Italians I’ve worked with and I’ve truly enjoyed spending time with them.
- hwers 5y agoIs it allowed to express concern about china gaining incentive influence through investments like this on HN?
- lnxg33k1 5y agoIf they give me a million I can give them some influence too
- AussieWog93 5y agoI wouldn't worry about it too much. I complain about China here all the time, and the worst that has happened is a particular Hong Kong-based Frenchman disagreeing with me. ;)
- nicoburns 5y agoIt is, but you I would be interested in what kind of nefarious things you think China might concretely do with that influence.
- osullip 5y agoAccording to Smart Company it's an Aussie unicorn. https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/news/scalapay-bnpl-unicorn-raise/ https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/news/scalapay-b...
- ChemSpider 5y agoAccepting money from Tencent is a shame. No reasons at all to be proud of this. https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/28/chinese-tech-firms-fueling-beijings-repression https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/28/chinese-tech-firms-fueli...
- unixhero 5y agoWhy is this interesting, "gets it first unicorn" , "unicorn spotted"...
- Toine 5y agoBecause we're in a gigantic bubble where money is pouring so massively into so many startups that every metric is completely twisted/reversed, valuations are completely disconnected from reality, and the social validation they get from buzzwords on LinkedIn is more important than actual value delivered. TLDR : madness
- durnygbur 5y agoThe business scenario on their landing page is... take a loan to buy a piece of clothing... Instead of making the clothes cheaper for end consumer, now the consumer can indebt themselves to buy something sold with 5000% markup. Here is your 1 year payment plan for 50ml bottle of Schramani perfumes.
- giorgioz 5y agoYes I also believe it's a terrible service no-one should use! If you can't afford luxury products don't buy them yet! I made the same critic on swedish startup Klarna: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28139376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28139376
- jollybean 5y agoAmerican firms like Tiger are starting to back off these crazy valuations. This is not a very big company, this is one of those huge multiple type valuations we've seen of the 'SoftBank' type. Tencent also put $50M in Kit a while back at a sky high valuation. I think this is really about a lot of excess Chinese owned US/EU currency looking for a place to park, and so valuations are still lofty in this way. Tiger Global et. al. have said they are pulling back from the later stage huge buy ins and this is the opposite of that.
- mfontani 5y agoScalapay divides a purchase into N smaller installments, with no fees. How are they going to make money?
- theodorton 5y agopatio11 wrote a really insightful blog post earlier this year on Buy Now Pay Later business models. https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/buy-now-pay-later/ https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/buy-now-pay-later/
- eunos 5y agoI'm concerned if BNPL practice flourishing because it's quite easy to trigger systemic crisis later on. Also quite ironic Tencent funded them, Ant group was whammed by Chinese Govt because they were promoting BNPL on scale.
- AussieWog93 5y ago>I'm concerned if BNPL practice flourishing because it's quite easy to trigger systemic crisis later on. Genuine question - how would that work? BNPL companies tend to have pretty low limits and demand repayment fairly quickly, so I don't think it could lead to a GFC-scale bad debt situation at the very least.
- eunos 5y agoWell when I watched the big short, they said that house mortgage is the safest investment ever.
- AussieWog93 5y agoHouse mortgages are not capped at $2k and repaid over 8 weeks...
- gpderetta 5y agoThat was a great article, thanks.
- eole666 5y agoYay, hundreds of millions of chinese dollars invested in a brand new italian payment company doing nothing really new... So exciting, so unicorn. And almost nobody is talking about what Scalapay actually do, not in the article, not in here. How is this payment platform different than the other ones ? What tech are they using ? Is crypto-currency involve ? Do they actually propose apps on android and iOS to do payment for shop owners ? Is it nice to use ? What the point of paying everything in 3 times ? What will they do with 497 millions dollars ? You could create 497 payment companies with that money.
- Ecco 5y agoDoes anyone have any info on the early days of this company? They apparently announced a 40M seed round in 2021 but were actually founded in 2019.
- wejick 5y agoMeanwhile Mooney VR46 just launched their motoGP bike
- pxeger1 5y agoUnregulated loans, everybody's favourite 100% ethical fintech niche...
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y agoSo basically copy Klarna?
- Taurenking 5y ago
- ericls 5y agoOops
- gnicholas 5y agoWonder if we should start inflation-indexing the cutoff for unicorn status...
- kottaram 5y agoI like how the article cuts off the founders head at the top. /s
- gw67 5y agoIt's incredible how much press coverage it gets a startup when raising VC funds compared to a startup growing in revenues/profits.