Maritime Ventures, the system initiative launched by Cdp Venture Capital and operationally managed by Cariplo Factory and Bridgemaker, which aggregates primary financial and industrial investors such as Fincantieri, Psa Italy, Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Neva Sgr and Friulia with the support of institutional partners like the Municipality of Genoa, the Friuli-Venezia Giulia Region and Confindustria Genoa and with the collaboration of Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center, has announced the birth of Fundo.one, the first startup born within its venture building program.
Fundo.one is a platform, based on artificial intelligence, designed to respond to one of the most urgent needs emerging from market analysis: facilitating the process of accessing financing, incentives, and public tenders in the nautical, logistics-port, and shipbuilding sectors for SMEs in the supply chain.
Only 31% of SMEs apply for public funding (396 billion euros in 2024) and less than two out of ten SMEs (16%) use Supply Chain Finance instruments (594 billion euros in 2024). If we look at the specific nautical sector, the situation does not improve. This is very clearly highlighted by an analysis conducted in the first months of activity of Maritime Ventures on over 45 companies in the supply chain, which identified six priority areas of innovation for these entities: among them, regulatory complexity, traceability, digitalization of organizations, and communication between stakeholders.
Fundo.one was therefore created with the aim of responding to these needs thanks to an AI-native platform, designed and trained by sector experts. With a rapid registration, by defining the company’s investment objectives, it enables automated and continuous search for tenders, simplifying every phase of the application submission process, followed by management and support for reporting in a single dashboard, breaking down barriers to accessing facilitated finance and reducing time and costs for SMEs in the nautical sector.
In particular, Fundo.one offers a system that allows for the immediate identification of which tenders are relevant, with constant alerts on new opportunities, to improve the success rate of applications. The platform is constantly updated on all tender regulations and all previous successful cases, to automate at the highest level via AI agents, all with automated submission and deadline reminders, and with the possibility of being guided by Fundo.one’s experts.
The Fundo.one platform will continue to be enriched with new functionalities, covering access to other financing possibilities for SMEs, starting with supply chain finance, facilitating access to and management of confirming and reverse factoring of invoices for SMEs in industrial and complex supply chains like the maritime ones, with a planned launch in 2026.
“Just 14 months after the establishment of Maritime Ventures, we are proud to present our first venture to the market. With Fundo.one we realize the first piece of an ambitious project and record positive feedback regarding our venture building model: a lean process that develops startups in a serial manner, starting from concrete needs that emerge from the market to develop and prototype digital solutions that are tested on the market to launch only what is truly needed.
Maritime Ventures operates with the dynamism of a startup and with the solid support of some of the most significant industrial, financial, and institutional players in the country,” commented Enrico Noseda, CEO of Maritime Ventures and chief innovation officer of Cariplo Factory.
“SMEs operating in the boating industry, port logistics, and industrial components report difficulty in identifying the opportunities for grants and funding available to them, in addition to the regulatory and bureaucratic complexity to manage. And this risks slowing down innovation in a crucial sector of our country. Fundo.one aims to be the tool that facilitates, supports, and accelerates the process to allow all SMEs to access new funding efficiently. All this has been made possible by the excellent work carried out by the Maritime Ventures team and the support of the project partners, whom I thank again,” added Andrea Giustina, CEO of Fundo.one.
