Bologna Gathering showcases Italy’s rising innovation momentum

Last month, I attended The Bologna Gathering, a curated event bringing 300 selected innovation leaders to Italy. Bologna is a city in Northern Italy and the capital of the Emilia-Romagna region.  The event represents an increased effort to host tech events beyond capital city hubs to broader regions, which may not have the same number of startups or investment capital but are equally able to stand on their own, and it was a stellar event.

According to Cubbit co-founders Stefano Onofri and Alessandro Cillario, recent months have shown a continued rise in international capital invested in Italian startups" 

"We're approaching a pivotal moment in the maturity of Italy's tech ecosystem. This is especially important at a time of geopolitical uncertainty, when Europe is seeking to transform its young tech companies into global champions.

Italy must be central to this journey, and The Bologna Gathering is a key forum to accelerate this process and showcase the strengths of our region."

Bologna’s Leonardo supercomputer opens doors to industry with €300M AI Factory

At a side event facilitated by LandinBo, a local designed to support and attract emerging technology companies, startups, and investment ventures, Laura Morselli from Cineca introduced IT4LIA.

This new €300 million AI Factory project leverages Leonardo, the Bologna-based supercomputer located at the Bologna Technopole.

Managed by Cineca and co-funded by EuroHPC JU and the Italian government, Leonardo delivers a peak performance of around 250 petaflops, making it a critical asset for AI development, scientific research, and industrial innovation without having to rely on US hyperscalers. The side event stood out in that attendees were simply not the usual startup and investor mix, but included plenty of industrial players (in other words, potential customers).

Beyond academia, Leonardo is increasingly being opened up to the private sector through initiatives like the IT4LIA AI Factory, a €300 million programme launched in 2025.  With demand far outstripping supply, Leonardo is helping to position Bologna as a strategic European AI and HPC hub, underpinning both innovation and digital sovereignty.

Morselli stressed, "If you want millions of GPU hours, you have to hurry up." Morselli explained how companies can collaborate with the IT4LIA infrastructure:

"Most likely you will be moving your data to our supercomputer, and you can tell us: 'I need support because I need to scale up.'

We can become collaborators on your project, which means that we have access to the files in your storage location — but you decide the level of access you want to give us."

According to Morselli, some companies are already very independent because they've used HPC before, while others prefer co-development. "We're adapting to both."

Asked about market demand, she pointed out that capacity is already oversubscribed:

"Leonardo has always been the most requested supercomputer at the European level. It's always completely full. In April we opened calls for private companies — 30 per cent of European capacity is now dedicated to them — and it was gone immediately.

We're still accepting applications, but there's more queueing time. If you want millions of GPU hours, you have to hurry up."

The project's €420 million budget covers both capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenditures (OpEx) for the first five years of production.

Bologna pushes to redefine Italy’s innovation narrative

Attending regional events is always interesting, as I invariably end up speaking with the champions of local tech ecosystems. 

In Bologna, a clear pattern emerged in conversations with people from both the local and broader Italian startup scene: while they were eager to highlight the ecosystem's strengths, they often slipped into candid critiques of Italy's relatively conservative investment culture.

Many described a low appetite for risk, with those holding capital more inclined to invest in real estate than in higher-risk ventures.

Numerous people pointed out that Italy's strong reputation for fashion, tourism, and food & wine has, in some ways, overshadowed its potential and achievements in other sectors like manufacturing, deeptech and logistics. There's a certain ongoing tension between the country's La Dolce Vita image — a celebration of beauty and simple pleasures, such as enjoying a glass of wine during lunch — and its push to be recognised as a serious player in innovation and high-growth industries.

In response, the Bologna Gathering represented a concerted effort to position Bologna as a hub for deeptech innovation and change that narrative, especially abroad. 

Italian tech leaders diagnose what’s holding the country back

Gianni Cuozzo, CEO of Exein, shared that the company was forced to have a global mindset from day one.

"It wasn't a choice — it was survival.

Now, more than 50 per cent of our revenues come from the Asia-Pacific region, 25 per cent from Europe, and 25 per cent from the US. We were international before we were ready for it."

He contends that if Exein were based in Tel Aviv or San Francisco," nobody would question our technology."

"As Italians, we have to be better than everyone else to overcome stereotypes — We present Exein as a global company with Italian founders, not an Italian company. That distinction matters when attracting top talent internationally."

Luca De Angelis from Tech Europe Foundation shared that in terms of R&D, Italy ranks higher than France and Canada in global scientific publications. 

"What's missing are strong entrepreneurial ideas and urgency. Tech transfer is a specialised job. You need people who can move an idea left or right to make it commercial — and that pipeline doesn't exist in Italy today."

The contends that the most fragile research stage is TRL 1–5. "That's where deep tech lives or dies, and almost no one is there. Traditional VC isn't designed for this stage.

I've never seen a good idea that didn't find capital — but we don't have enough good ideas in the pipeline."

Alec Ross, former State Department Innovation Advisor in the Obama administration, tech policy expert and Distinguished Professor at Bologna Business School, minced no words, sharing the need for a concentration on business school graduate education in innovation and the intersection of geopolitics with geoeconomics.

He called for Italy to move beyond the mentality of old industrial Europe and advised startups to rely less on government programs and more on investors. 

It's a view I heard echoed across the event. 

Alessandro Cillario, co-CEO and co-founder at Cubbit, urged attendees:

"Don't wait for help, it's up to all of us in this room."

Ross also raised a topic I heard many mention, low salaries resulting in a talent exodus, as well as a challenge for cities such as Bologna to attract top talent. He asserted: 

"Your salaries in Europe are embarrassing. My US-based 22-year-old son makes more money after 1 year of college than a 30-year-old CEO." 

“Failure used to scare us too”: Nordic unvestor shares how ecosystems mature

Egita Polanska, Partner at Outlast Fund, shared valuable insights with attendees, drawing on lessons learned in the Nordics. She shared:

"Our combined markets are tiny — six or seven million people — so we're kicked out of our comfort zone early. 

Urgency is built in. "Failure used to scare us too, but the ecosystem matured. Now failure is accepted as part of the journey — not just by founders, but by investors and corporates too."

She contends that Finland has successfully established a connection between universities, public funding, and commercialisation.

"Students think about business from the start. I can't think of a successful deep tech company that didn't have strong corporate partnerships. The supply chain has to work for innovation to scale."

With world-class education and infrastructure like the Leonardo supercomputer, increasing international capital flows, candid self-assessment from ecosystem leaders, and valuable lessons drawn from abroad, Bologna is positioning itself as more than a regional player. It’s becoming a focal point for Europe’s deeptech ambitions, blending tradition with urgency to carve out a stronger role on the global stage.

Bologna startups to have on your radar

Besides local standouts like Cubbit, Musixmatch, identifAI, and CellPly, the region is also home to an abundance of younger startups. Some standouts:

 AdapTronics

AdapTronics is an Italian deeptech startup redefining how robots grasp and manipulate objects—both on Earth and in space.  Their signature innovation is the Electro Active Adhesive Layer (EAAL): a thin, flexible film that becomes adhesive on demand via electrostatics, enabling a robot to pick up items of virtually any shape, size, or material with minimal energy use and built-in tactile sensing. 

Lithium Lasers 

Lithium Lasers designs and manufactures ultrashort-pulse laser systems for high-precision applications. Its flagship product, FEMTOFLASH, is a femtosecond GHz-burst laser tailored for micromachining, non-linear optics, and complex material processing tasks—especially when tight tolerances, low thermal damage, and fine feature control are required. 

MAMA SCIENCE

MAMA SCIENCE is a biotech focused on creating advanced, sustainable, and non-toxic biomaterials through proprietary bio-inspired synthesis processes. It provides solutions for industries seeking to minimise environmental impact and replace traditional, harmful materials.Product lines include biodegradable and active packaging coatings, self-sanitising surface additives (without biocides or nanomaterials), and materials that mimic natural purifying systems for air and water. 

TrueScreen

TrueScreen is an Italian Trust as a Service / legaltech startup focused on restoring reliability in the digital age. Its platform certifies the authenticity of digital content—photos, videos, documents, emails, chats, screenshots — and detects tampering (including deepfake or metadata manipulation) to provide court-ready evidence.

Lead image: Freepik.