Is Italy’s tech ecosystem on the rise? Takeaways from The Bologna Gathering 2025

0:11Hello and welcome to The Entrepreneurs on Monocle Radio, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. Today's show is all about technology. First, we'll head to an Italian city with ambitions to become Europe's next tech hub. The Italian tech scene has changed a lot, but the ecosystem size is surpassed by even the Nordic countries, which have populations of the size of a single region of Italy. Then we'll hear how the centre of tech innovation might be shifting from Silicon Valley, and why one country in particular has been far more inventive than it's often given credit for.

0:46China gets systematically underestimated and the idea that somehow they're only going to developing applications are good at copying what's available elsewhere is dated by about five to ten years. And we'll check in with an old friend of the show to hear about his company's push to stop AI slop from taking over the internet. We are sending traffic to humans and hopefully not sending traffic to AI-generated websites. This is The Entrepreneurs with me, Tom Edwards.

1:25We start this week's programme in Italy. Last month saw the third instalment of the Bologna Gathering, an annual conference that was held in a beautiful Mario Cuccinella design building at Bologna Business School in the hills overlooking the city. The invite-only event, in English, brought together a range of Italian start-ups as well as investors and corporates. The aim? Create investment but also shed light on a tech scene that often flies somewhat under the radar in a country better known for La Dolce Vita. Our Milan-based Europe editor-at-large, Ed Stocker, was there and sent us this report from Bologna.

2:00Take your seats in the main stage we're about to start. Thank you. Two evenings and one full day of workshops, panel discussions and networking, the Bologna gathering is a slickly run event. OK, David, please turn the music off. And one that clearly looks to shift the dial. The Italian text scene has changed a lot. I started looking at it since 2021, like right after Covid kind of struck. That's Estonia-based, half-Swedish, half-Italian Niklas Pavoncelli, the head organiser of the Bologna gathering. At this point in time, 2025, the ecosystem is growing. We passed some milestones that make us say, yes, there is a tech ecosystem in Italy, but I also still understand that some systematic problems still exist.

2:51And by that I mean Italy is one of the biggest economies of Europe, but the ecosystem size is still smaller than the Spanish one, for example. And it is surpassed by even the Nordic countries, which have populations of the size of a single region of Italy. Still, Pavancelli admits things are heading in the right direction. But one of the biggest challenges is not just shifting the dial, but completely changing the narrative. First, an admission, and not from him. At the same time, it's true, Europe is losing. We have to admit it. We have to admit it. That's Alessandro Cilario, co-founder of Bologna's Cabot, a key organiser of the event, speaking on the opening morning.

3:38He's talking about Italy and Europe losing out to the US's tech might. Still, we have not lost yet. And this is something that nobody is saying because the narrative that we have right now is we are losing. We are losers. We have no chance. That's the wrong narrative. We meet Gianni Quazzo, the founder and CEO of Exene, a cybersecurity company that protects smart devices from cars to cameras. In his own words, he's building... The first immune system of digital life. And Quazzo feels the same way as the others about the narrative. Right now is the right moment to invest in Italy and to double down in Italy.

4:19Also to go behind the stereotypes of this, you know, Bella Vita country in which people come only on vacation. We can actually build technology here. We have done this for thousands of years, so I don't think that we should stop continuing doing so. Quazzo knows what he's talking about. Exxene, based in Rome, is a true Italian success story which raised 70 million euros in Series C funding over the summer. It has a staggering 1.5 billion devices under management right now. And while the CEO admits there are some difficulties being in Italy as a tech company, from regulation to a weak internal market, he also says in its own way, it helps.

5:06So I think our success actually is based on the fact that we are Italian. When you are building such a kind of technology in Italy, you are forced to sell this technology abroad. And this creates this international mindset that you need to operate on a global level and a global market. So I think because we knew that the market in Italy was limited for our technology, we were forced to go abroad immediately. And our first license we actually sold in South Korea. So we were global since day one, basically. From the lunch break to a sit down dinner in a stunning villa outside Bologna, Monaco has a chance to meet plenty of interesting Italian tech founders that are looking to do new things in the country.

5:49Weyla, for example, is a point-to-point van ride pooling service that has launched in Milan and currently has 10 vehicles. My name is Mario Ferretti. I'm the co-founder of Weyla, the first city van pooling service in Italy, active in Milan since 2004. Italy is growing in terms of innovative ecosystem, in terms of specific verticals. Mobility is one of them. So for sure there's much to do also when it comes to communicating the right things, even beyond our country. It's a responsibility of everyone and anyone in the ecosystem. We need to attract for sure talent, investments and ideas from abroad.

6:24There is space to grow ideas, there is space to innovate, there is space to disrupt. We also meet Iris Skrami, the founder of Renoon, visiting the Bologna gathering for a whistle-stop two-hour network. The startup, which focuses on digital product passport solutions, largely for the fashion world, was actually founded in Amsterdam, but Scrami is in the process of moving the company to her native Milan. The choice was largely to do with the fashion market, but she's also embracing it. Honestly, seeing the projects that I also have been seeing today, I feel very, very positive about the Italian scene because there's so many Italians as well that somehow they never forget that they're Italian.

7:11So I think that's actually a big strength of the Italian culture. So it's actually really nice to see that they come back, they decide to keep the companies or come back with their companies to Italy and grow the scene here. I think it's amazing. I think also for the personal life of a founder, I mean, Italy offers some of the best lifestyles that you could have. So, yeah, it's a great moment for founders in Italy. While there may be more founders in Italian cities, and there's no doubt that the talent is there, there is still work to be done on making sure Italy's tech scene mirrors its economic clout and population size.

7:48As much as it's to do with business, the Bologna gathering also shows what's possible, and with it, making Italian startups hungrier for success and undoing some of Italians' natural caution. So is the battle then about changing mindsets? Here's head organiser Niklas Pavoncelli again. I guess that I understand better today what Gandhi referred to when if you want to change the world, you have to start from yourself. Because it is so. It changes your perspective to the world. It changes the way, the actions you decide to take. And consequently, you inspire others to do the same. And you could say, in a nutshell, this is why the Bologna gathering, That's why we bring in success cases, people that is trying, that is doing something great to inspire other people to do great things.

8:34With the Bologna gathering as its backbone, let's indeed hope for more great things for the Italian tech scene.

8:45For Monocle in Bologna, I'm Ed Stocker. My thanks to Ed for his report. You can find out more and look out for the next edition by heading to bolognagathering.com.

9:08You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Developing a new business isn't just about having that lightbulb moment, it's also about having sufficient infrastructure and support around you to help turn ideas into reality. Silicon Valley has long been the world's hub of tech innovation, But in the last couple of decades, that has begun to change. China has developed into its biggest competitor, and other parts of the world, from Southeast Asia to right here in Europe, are hard at work, trying to emulate their success as well. Maren Gull is the author of a book called The New Geography of Innovation, which examines how different countries stack up against each other and where today's best and most innovative technological startups are coming from.

9:48He spoke with Monocle's Chris Chermak, who began by asking how Silicon Valley developed into the hub it is today. So if you go back to the 1960s, it was really the East Coast that was the centre of technology in the US and specifically what was called the Massachusetts miracle back then in Boston, where all the major tech companies like Xerox, for instance, Raytheon were based. In the book, I asked the question, so what changed that the centre of gravity within about a decade shifted from the East Coast to the West Coast? And there are many different answers to that. Just to take one, for example, this is the work of Dr.

10:23Anneliese Xanian at Berkeley, that the role of non-compete clauses played a huge role in creating a network in the valley where you could leave your company on a Friday and go and join a competitor on a Monday. Whereas on the East Coast, companies were much more autarchic systems where people had long tenures. It was not socially acceptable to change your employers. And so you ended up with a situation where out in the West, you had a network where everything was much more connected. Ideas were circulating freely in the environment, whereas out in the East, things were locked up in individual companies.

11:00And this played a pretty substantial role in creating, in making the value what it is today. There are other factors at play here as well. There were defense contracts, which is something that's discussed very often. The role of one person, Frederick Terman. There is venture capital. All of these subplots are mentioned in the book. But the one that people might not know about is the role of the non-compete clauses. Now, Mehran, one thing that's interesting about this book as well is you're obviously focusing on different geographies, different places and where innovation plays a role. But the reasons for countries being successful hubs aren't necessarily what you think, almost what you're also saying there about Silicon Valley.

11:43And China, in some ways, is the best example of this. You look at the World Intellectual Property Organization, a UN body, their global innovation index. Switzerland is at the top. We can talk about that, but it's a country that doesn't play that big a role in tech innovation. China doesn't even appear anywhere in the top 10. Do we have sort of wrong, frankly, what makes an innovative country and society? So I think there is value to saying that there need to be more than just company valuations that should be at play when we measure innovation. So I think to that extent, I do agree with WIPO's approach of having many more measures, patent filings, for instance, how many STEM graduates do you have, and also trying somehow to capture innovation that happens outside of the context of fast-growing startups.

12:35In the book, I mentioned the example of Singapore, where there's a lot of innovation happening within the government. In places like Switzerland, there's a lot of public sector innovation in the form of the Swiss train system. So we do somehow need to capture that. So I think the principle behind the WIPO approach is a laudable one. Now, are these highly numerical ways to measure reality appropriate for the task at hand? I think that's a question much larger than the innovation index itself. That's something that's asked about the human development index, that's asked about pretty much every benchmark out there.

13:09I personally lean in favor of the second approach that I mentioned in the book, where the rough approximation using company valuations, which puts US at number one by a pretty sort of huge margin, then China, then all of Europe, and then the rest of the world. I feel like at the end of the process of writing this book, I thought that that measure by Atomico was a much more accurate reflection of what's happening in the world than what we see with WIPO. China at number two, as you say there, and you focus a lot on China in this book as being no longer the student. It has the best cited papers on AI.

13:46It has more quality scientific papers than the United States. I think what was so interesting to me reading about that, we accused China in the past of stealing intellectual property, et cetera, et cetera. That's sort of the perception. But does all that underestimate their prowess? And are we still underestimating that. I think of the example of an AI alternative to chat GPT being created in China. The world was shocked. Why was everyone caught by surprise? I think it's precisely because of what you said earlier, which is China gets systematically underestimated. And the idea that somehow they're only good at developing applications or good at copying what's available elsewhere is dated by about five to 10 years.

14:28Is China ahead? Is US ahead? That is a debatable proposition because China maybe has better open source models, the US has better closed source models. But if I were to reframe the question and say, is Chinese talent in the lead globally when it comes to AI? The answer is unequivocally yes. Go to any AI company in the US, whether it is NVIDIA, it's OpenAI, it's Meta, and you will find a plurality of Chinese talent working there. And not just people who have Chinese backgrounds, who did their undergraduate, graduate, sometimes even their PhDs at Chinese institutions. If you look at Meta's new super intelligence lab, where Mark Zuckerberg has hired people on$100 million salaries, seven out of 11 of the highest profile hires in that lab are of Chinese origin.

15:18And they went to three institutions, they did the undergrad at three institutions in China. China is not just competing at the level of applications, it is also competing at the level of basic research and doing it at the highest level globally. Mehran, what you say there also does bring this back to the United States because you talk about Chinese researchers in the U.S. And one of the interesting aspects of this book as well or a comment from a Chinese tech official, I believe, was that China is better at the implementation, but America still leads in breakthrough technologies. And they say the odds of this changing this is very low because of the U.S.

15:56university and immigration culture. And I do have to ask to bring this to current things, which by the nature of just happening in the last few weeks are not in your book. But are you worried that changes such as the H-1B visa restrictions by the Trump administration, universities losing international students in the U.S., is there a complacency there? Could all of this impact the way that the U.S. is, at least right now, still on top of tech innovation? So that really goes to the heart of the question about why is the U.S. competitive in tech in the first place? And the very simple answer to that question is China has a lot of people, but China still picks its talent from a talent base of a billion people, whereas the U.S.

16:39has the enormous luxury of picking from 7 billion people. And that is really what current policies are undermining. So, of course, anyone who is interested in innovation in the U.S. ought to be concerned about the turn that things have taken this year. Because, you know, the main difference between U.S. and China is if you go to a place like San Francisco, over half of people in that city speak a language other than English at home. On the other side, if you look at China in places like Shanghai and Beijing, less than 1 % of their population is international. An interesting fact there is, in absolute term, North Korea gets more immigrants than China.

17:16Not in per capita terms, in absolute terms. So this is one major advantage that the U.S. has, which it is handicapping itself by its own volition. So anyone who's interested in tech in the U.S. ought to be concerned about what's going on. And just finally, Mehran, a word on Europe. There are a lot of countries here, and you go into them in some ways individually. I find some of your details on this fascinating. The fact that Americans confuse Sweden and Switzerland so often is somewhat mind-boggling. But I guess if there's one broader thing to ask about Europe, it is that they're not particularly confident in their abilities.

17:56You could describe examples of the UK selling off companies to the US when they could have been national champions. Does Europe need to learn to be more confident to stand on its own two feet? in the tech innovation space? So I think one statistic says it all. People often use, say, DeepMind in the same breath as other companies like ByteDance, Anthropic, OpenAI, and it very much is, that is its peer group. But if you look at their valuations, they cannot be more skewed. OpenAI, Anthropic, ByteDance are all worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And DeepMind was sold to Google for only about half a billion dollars 10 years ago, which was not even among Google's top 10 acquisitions ever.

18:42And it might turn out to be its most consequential. So yes, there is a problem in Europe of selling companies too early, of companies being undercapitalized, of companies not being owned by their own employee base, which is important for a number of different reasons. And companies essentially remaining private for too long. So it's not just a lack of ambition. It's also other structural factors as well that are preventing the sorts of companies emerging in Europe that are coming up in other parts of the world. That was the author Meryn Gull in conversation with Monocle's Chris Chermak. And the New Geography of Innovation is available now, published by William Collins.

19:27You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Finally on today's programme, a chat about the lurking dangers of creeping AI in our everyday lives. Our Laura Kramer caught up with friend of the show, Vladimir Prelevit, founder and CEO of Kargi, a paid-for ad-free search engine that provides an alternative to the big tech models. Vlad began by telling Laura about Kargi's latest feature, SlopStop, a way to combat the proliferation of low-quality AI-generated content on the web. AI Slop is the low-quality AI-generated content. It could be text, it could be images, it could be videos. that's starting to plague the web.

20:08And Kagi is building technology to basically recognize and then allow users to filter out AI slop in their search results when using Kagi's search engine. So this is actually rolling out this week. And there are two ways it will work. First, we will allow users to flag any AI slop that they encounter on the web, which will help our team identify and process it. And second, we are building our own systems that will crawl the web and proactively find, identify, and flag AI slops. So when you use Kagi search and services, you do not see that in your search results if you so wish. Usually this kind of content is very low quality and you do not want to get your information from such websites.

20:59So this is part of Kage's mission to humanize the web and keep humans relevant on the web. And we think it will greatly help increase the quality of our search results for our customers. And tell me how big of a problem this really is. I mean, at what point did you realize the growing issue of AI slop that we are exposed to? And I can tell you as a journalist, and I get a lot of emails about new products, it all looks the same. And it's just fascinating to me because you want to stand out, especially when you're pitching. But tell me, how big of a problem is this? It is a big problem already, but it's just going to explode completely because the AI is getting very easy to access.

21:47We now have advanced, not just image and text models, we have advanced video models. So it all started by image slop. It started flooding the web last year. And this is when we started actually doing something about it. And we introduced a feature in our search results where you can remove AI generated images. And now we are expanding this to both video and text. And the thing is that the amount of this is going to explode in the next couple of years exponentially. And so we want to be ahead of that. and really allow the users to filter out this from their search results and when they're consuming information.

22:28And how can you tell the difference between, because you said it's bad AI that you're kind of tackling, between, I guess, AI that's helping somebody create something and AI completely taking over. Where's the line for that? Yeah, that's a good question. So one part of that is detecting that something is AI, written content. There are various ways you can do that. I think us as humans, you can already sort of immediately tell if it's AI written or not through some, you know, different signs. And we use these same signs. For example, AI content almost never has any grammatical errors. So if there are no grammatical errors, then, you know, at least that's a signal.

23:12If there are some, likely it's been written by a human. And then there are all these other signs like, you know, using EM dashes, using different quotes and things like that. So these are just some things that for me as a human helped me, you know, immediately spot that something is AI written or not. Obviously, we are using much more sophisticated technology for that. The hard part, once you understand something is AI generated, how do you classify it as a slop or not? because not all AI-generated content is necessarily bad. And so this is more nuanced, and this is where we are actually counting on a user community to help us flag, and then we will manually review and perform manual action on content.

24:01So there is a fine line. There's going to be learnings. We're just getting started, and I'm sure we're going to improve this over the next months and years. But at least we are doing something about it. And, you know, from a standpoint of a search engine and information consumption service, it is very important for us to get ahead of this game. One thing that we have going for us is usually when there is a mass production of low quality AI content, the purpose of that content is to monetize the page with some kind of ads. when you have that in addition on the page and we are pretty good at detecting if the pages are infested with ads and tracking already that's a main part of our algorithms already so when you combine the two then you know it's pretty strong signal that this is probably a page we don't want to show to our users in search results or use it for to generate ai answers and things like that if we don't tackle this what do you see the dangers of it are if we just kind of allow ourselves to be exposed to all this content that's happening?

25:07The web as we know it will be very different few years from now. Most of it will be I generated because, you know, the cost to do that will go down. And that presents a challenge for us as a society because information is valuable and you should be able to trust the source of your information. Unfortunately, most of the current sources of information do not have interests aligned with the consumer of the information. By that, I mostly mean ad based search engines and such. So users are already most users are already at disadvantage. The information they are being served is not necessarily in their best interest.

25:48Now with AI content coming into play, that's going to get even trickier. You know, this just makes me believe even stronger that a service such as ours, where the incentives are aligned and people pay Kagi exactly to filter out low quality information so that the information they get is valuable, relevant to what they're searching for and in their best interest, you know, are going to become even more valuable in the future. And I don't know, I guess it's just starting out, but are you worried that this could turn into a sort of arms race where the AI is getting better at hiding and you kind of have to constantly keep chasing it in a way.

26:29It will. But we have been dealing with this for years already in terms of ads and ad tech, which is, you know, originally what our company was designed to combat on the web, all this content whose entire purpose was just to serve ads. And as I say, proliferation of AI generated content and low quality content is usually connected to some kind of low quality monetization so so we have that going for us like nobody's gonna create millions of pages and just let them sit there with no reason and also you know if somebody has a personal blog they're blogging and you know their career is paying for that writing so they have no ads nothing we do the opposite thing for those through a project called kagi small web we actually surface those kind of blogs and content very high in our results.

27:27So we are sending traffic to humans and hopefully not be sending traffic to AI generated websites. If SlapStop works the way you hope, I read that you're aiming to reduce AI slop and search results by 75 % within six months. Do you think that's doable? Yeah, I think it is. We have some pretty advanced models. We are already doing that very successfully for AI images. And now we are working on doing the same for text. So I think we will get very good at it. And 75 % will be the lower end goal for us. That was Vlad Prelevit, founder and CEO of Kargi. And you can find out more about Kargi's excellent products by heading to kargi.com.