Plino, the start-up that aims to simplify and speed up the analysis of accounting, financial and management control data for SMEs using generative artificial intelligence, has announced that it has closed a €650,000 funding round.
The start-up, founded in 2023 as part of Vento, the Turin-based venture building programme, received its first investments from Exor Ventures, followed by Berkeley SkyDeck Europe, UC Berkeley’s accelerator with Cariplo Factory and Lendlease, and a pool of Italian investors led by Techaround.vc, with the participation of Zooga.vc and several business angels, including CFOs and accountants.
The capital raised will enable Plino to accelerate the development of its platform with new AI-based features, such as cash flow forecasting, automatic generation of reports in natural language, and accurate profitability analysis for individual products or orders. At the same time, the start-up will strengthen its team, currently composed of nine people working in product, technology and sales, and will aim to consolidate partnerships with professional firms and trade associations, bringing the innovation of artificial intelligence to the accounting profession.
“We chose to invest in Plino because it represents the perfect combination of a multidisciplinary and determined team and one of the most significant and overlooked challenges facing the Italian economy: management control for SMEs. The market is large, still largely unexplored, and the timing is right: more and more SMEs are becoming aware of the need to structure more rigorous and strategic financial management,” said Pietro Invernizzi, managing director of Techaround.vc, in a statement. – Plino’s solution stands out for its ease of use, which makes it accessible even to entrepreneurs and managers with little digital expertise, breaking down the technological barrier that has often hindered the adoption of similar tools. This, combined with a solid product vision and a data-driven approach, convinces us that Plino can establish itself as a benchmark in the Italian market and successfully scale up in other European markets as well.
Incubated since 2024 at I3P, the Innovative Business Incubator of the Polytechnic University of Turin, Plino was born from the meeting of Pietro Galimberti, Viola Bonesu and Enrico Castelli, who chose to combine their different backgrounds, from philosophy to engineering, finance to artificial intelligence, to demonstrate that it is at the intersection of disciplines that the most innovative solutions for businesses are born. Together, they decided to tackle one of the biggest and most underestimated challenges for Italian SMEs: financial management, which is often slow, manual and based on incomplete information.
One of our clients in the food industry informed us that they spent over ten hours a week manually reclassifying turnover and costs to identify their largest customers, best-selling product families, and the areas that absorbed most of their costs. Even the management of the five current accounts was entirely manual, with no immediate visibility on cash flows. With Plino, this work has been completely automated and managers now make strategic decisions in a matter of seconds, with clear data that is always under control,” explain the founders of Plino. (pictured with the team) – And cases like this are not isolated: every day we meet dozens of companies in different sectors, from manufacturing to construction, from hospitality to catering, which are experiencing the same difficulties. Our goal is to help them say goodbye to manual processes and Excel, replacing them with reliable insights for informed strategic decisions.
Italian SMEs face a fragmented process on a daily basis: data scattered among accountants, management software and banks, manual analyses on dozens of Excel spreadsheets and waiting times that force managers to make decisions based on intuition rather than numbers. Plino aims to overturn this logic by offering a single platform that allows users to monitor sales, costs, revenues and cash flows in real time, forecast future liquidity and automatically generate clear and immediate reports. Today, Plino already supports over a hundred SMEs throughout Italy and in strategic sectors such as manufacturing, services, food, hospitality and construction. With this round, the start-up aims to consolidate its presence in Italy, enrich the product with new areas of analysis such as labour costs and production performance, and further expand the team.
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