Vento

Applications for the next edition of Reef are open.

Last year:

- close to 900 people applied for 40 spots in that room
- 40% of them were Italians who’d left the country and came back just to build here
- 42 startups have come out of Reef so far
- 32 of them are still standing today
- They’ve raised a total of €120.4M
- And created 351 jobs

Will you be the next founder building something that changes the game?

40 founders
5 months, full time
Pre-idea, pre-team

Find your co-founders and build your startup

Submit you application by October 18.

Apply now! Link in bio!

The third juror of Vento Selects – Italians in Tech is obsessed with robotics, AI, physical AI... and plenty more.

Thomas Wolf, co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, has built his career around one idea: AI research, models and datasets should be open and accessible to everyone, not locked away. That mission has made him one of the driving forces behind open-source AI.

Here are a few lesser-known facts about him:

💡 Before AI, there was law. Thomas holds a law degree from Panthéon-Sorbonne University and spent five years working as a Patent Attorney, helping startups and major companies protect their intellectual property.

💡 His path into AI started in physics. With a PhD in Statistical and Quantum Physics, Thomas was doing physics consulting when he noticed something: the math powering the deep learning boom was, in essence, statistical physics wearing a new name. That realization is what drew him into the field.

💡 He's got a spidey sense for spotting where technology is heading next and right now, it's telling him robotics is having its "transformer moment," echoing where language models stood just a few years ago.

💡 He's an optimist at heart. Speaking at last year's edition of Wave by Vento, he shared his belief that humans are inherently creative, and will find no shortage of smart ways to put new tools to work.

What really sets him apart is his appetite for moonshots: projects that look nearly impossible or wildly high-risk on paper, tackled with the discipline to break them down and execute step by step.

Stay tuned to find out who's on the 2026 Vento Selects – Italians in Tech list!

The best developer in the room can still lose if she or he doesn’t get timing right.

Nicola Farronato, founder and co-CEO of W4 Games, puts timing above talent, above genius, above almost everything else: get the moment wrong and none of it matters.

An average person who catches the right timing beats a genius stuck in the wrong one. After that, he says, it's not magic, but energy and consistency, built day by day toward the same vision.

Watch all the Vento Meets episodes at the link in bio 🎧

A startup doesn't survive on strategy.

It survives because someone refuses to let it die.

Augusto Marietti, co-founder and CEO of Kong, talks about the moment building stops being about tactics and becomes about will: nobody else is going to keep pushing the company forward, so you do, for as long as you choose to.

It takes, in his words, a strong brain and a tender heart, both held at once.

John Elkann, Chairman of Vento, adds what makes that belief last: it has to hold for what you're doing, who you're doing it with, and who you're doing it for.

Watch the Vento Meets episodes at the link in bio 🎧

Did you know that one of our Vento Selects jurors helped build a transparency standard now used by nearly 90 tech companies?

Meet Dorothy Chou, one of the three names behind the jury of Vento Selects - Italians in Tech, our new annual list celebrating the best young Italian talents working at the forefront of tech.

Dorothy is Strategic Advisor at Google DeepMind, where she works to make sure AI's biggest decisions don't get made in a vacuum, and is also an active angel investor backing overlooked founders across Europe.

Here three things about her you might not know:

💡 She didn't come up through engineering. She studied international politics at Georgetown and later added a master's in practical ethics from Oxford, an unusual route into one of the most technical industries on the planet.
💡 Long before DeepMind, while working on safety policy at Uber, she dug into the company's driver screening criteria and found that a standard criminal-record check was quietly filtering out people of color and immigrants at a much higher rate. She helped fix it.
💡 She's built a track record working closely with firms like Atomico, scouting overlooked founders before everyone else catches on.

Spot the pattern, and you'll understand exactly why she's one of three people deciding who makes this year's list.

Stay tuned to know who will be chosen for 2026 Vento Selects - Italians in Tech!

What a (first half of) year, this 2026.

The Vento rebrand, the launch of a new edition of Wave (formerly Italian Tech Week), a new Reef cohort that has already produced promising startups.

But the heart of what we do at Vento, the thing that drives everything, is the incredible companies we meet along the way and have the fortune to invest in.

Not just a lot of new deals, but also plenty of great news from our portfolio, which now counts more than 190 companies based all over the world: we celebrated Lexroom closing a $50M Series B, Pillar and Seltz raising respectively €12M and €12.5M seed rounds.

We organised meetups between Zurich and Barcelona where we met a lot of incredible Italian founders.

And we can’t wait to tell you more about all the new startups that have joined us over the past six months.

Follow us to stay updated on our portfolio, and if you have an incredible startup with at least one Italian on the founding team, based anywhere in the world, reach out.

What a (first half of) year, this 2026.

The Vento rebrand, the launch of a new edition of Wave (formerly Italian Tech Week), a new Reef cohort that has already produced promising startups.

But the heart of what we do at Vento, the thing that drives everything, is the incredible companies we meet along the way and have the fortune to invest in.

Not just a lot of new deals, but also plenty of great news from our portfolio, which now counts more than 190 companies based all over the world: we celebrated Lexroom closing a $50M Series B, Pillar and Seltz raising respectively €12M and €12.5M seed rounds.

We organised meetups between Zurich and Barcelona where we met a lot of incredible Italian founders.

And we can’t wait to tell you more about all the new startups that have joined us over the past six months.

Follow us to stay updated on our portfolio, and if you have an incredible startup with at least one Italian on the founding team, based anywhere in the world, reach out.

# # #

What a (first half of) year, this 2026.

The Vento rebrand, the launch of a new edition of Wave (formerly Italian Tech Week), a new Reef cohort that has already produced promising startups.

But the heart of what we do at Vento, the thing that drives everything, is the incredible companies we meet along the way and have the fortune to invest in.

Not just a lot of new deals, but also plenty of great news from our portfolio, which now counts more than 190 companies based all over the world.

We also celebrated Lexroom, closing a $50M Series B, Pillar and Seltz raising respectively €12M and €12.5M seed rounds.

We organised meetups between Zurich and Barcelona where we met a lot of incredible Italian founders and we can’t wait to tell you more about all the new startups that have joined us over the past six months.

Follow us to stay updated on our portfolio, and if you have an incredible startup with at least one Italian on the founding team, based anywhere in the world, reach out.

Not every question in an investment committee can be prepped for in advance.

One of our founders in residence at Reef got asked something that wasn’t in their question bank: where do you actually bring value to your customer, and where does your customer perceive that value? Two different things, and the gap between them is where most pitches fall apart. They hadn’t rehearsed an answer, but they had one anyway, because they live the problem every day. Sometimes the best preparation is just doing the work.

Watch the Vento Meets episodes at the link in bio 🎧

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