From Fruit Stand to Venture Capital Fund in London: The Story of Francesco Perticarari
From selling fruit in Macerata to leading a pioneering, community-driven deeptech VC fund in London, an Italian engineer is backing bold European highly technical founders as a soloVC
The original article was published in the April 2025 issue of Fortune Italia (number 3, year 8). Translated from the original in Italian.
In London, there is an Italian investor who, at 33, has already achieved a certain level of fame. The reason is simple: he is the only one leading a venture capital fund solo, sharing everything with his community. We met him.
Among European venture capitalists and startup founders, there is a growing sense of urgency. The increasingly strong feeling is that if they don’t take it upon themselves to solve the world’s problems, no one else will. Take nuclear fusion: European states have invested tens of billions. The most important project, ITER, has suffered several construction delays.
Even before it is completed, a small German startup (Proxima Fusion), led by an Italian (Francesco Sciortino), might succeed in building a demonstration reactor (also thanks, it must be said, to the supply chain created by ITER). For now, it exists only on paper, but that was enough to raise around fifty million-for a project that will need billions.
According to the latest deep tech report by Dealroom, Europe has the potential to become a global hub for advanced technologies. It has 6 of the top 20 universities and 9 of the top 25 research institutes in the world, specialized in many different technologies. What’s missing, the report says, are entrepreneurial culture and risk-taking.
In short, deep tech-the part of innovation dedicated to the most complex technologies, like nuclear fusion-needs money, and it needs it fast. Francesco Perticarari felt this so strongly that he decided to go it alone.
Raised in Macerata, as soon as he finished high school, he fled to England. Arriving in London, he saw a small fruit stand. He asked for a job and got it-a job he had already done in Macerata, helping out with the family business.
While still working at the stand (inventing, with a friend, a small business delivering fresh fruit to the city’s pubs), he got into tech. He began studying computer science, graduated from Goldsmiths University, and became a computer scientist. With two other co-founders, he built a meetup for founders in the deeptech sector: starting from a pub, it became the largest of its kind in Europe, taking its name from Silicon Roundabout, an area considered London’s (small) answer to Silicon Valley, full of startups, co-working spaces, and innovation.
Later, with no formal training as a venture capitalist, the Italian began investing as an angel. Some of the companies he invested in now report revenues of about 50 million euros. “I used all my money, I took out a loan. I just went for it,” he tells us after participating in a panel at the London stop of the Smau innovation tour, a platform dedicated to startups that each year have the chance to meet the most advanced innovation systems in Europe.
Among these ecosystems, London is by far the top. Again according to the Dealroom report, in 2024, UK venture capital invested $4.2 billion in deep tech, $1.2 billion more than France and $1.5 billion more than Germany. Italy lags far behind, with just 300 million. And while London alone is worth $2.5 billion in investments, Milan (the only Italian city that could hope to compete) isn’t even in the top twenty European cities.
It’s in London that Francesco achieved another milestone: in 2023, from the meetup, he founded Silicon Roundabout Ventures, a £5 million fund, with support from players like Molten Ventures, Multiple Capital, and the Italians at P101, as well as founders and former executives of startups that have already exited. Three of these were unicorns. Another is listed on the Nasdaq: Docebo, founded by Claudio Erba, one of the investors.
“I’ve made 16 investments in almost three years, focusing on sectors like quantum computing and defense,” Perticarari says. Usually, he invests between $150,000 and $200,000.
Perticarari has also attracted the attention of other investors for another reason. “He publishes almost all documents related to investments online, so the community is always kept informed. It’s an unusual and very interesting approach,” one London-based venture capitalist tells us. “He’s now very well known, also because being a solo general partner isn’t without risks: if something happens to you, what happens to your fund?”
“If you want to play this game, you have to do it well,” says Perticarari, who is very critical of the Italian approach to venture capital. He says his job is to hunt for leaders who “have both the technical ability to build technologies never commercialized before and the vision to turn them into a successful business. The Americans have taught us that you have to trust people who, at first glance, might seem crazy.” The “Messis of innovation” that the venture capitalist must look for, says Perticarari, cannot emerge if those who should help them “feel the need to teach you what it means to be a startup. I see too many accelerators and too little risk appetite.”
But according to Perticarari, Italy’s lag in venture capital is a matter of numbers-especially the numbers demanded of young companies. “I met a startup that was asked for 15% equity in exchange for 250,000 euros. Such a deal makes you completely uninvestable.” It’s no coincidence that in Italy, Perticarari has only one investment, “in a startup that didn’t seek funds from national players, but from European ones,” he says, referring to Ephos, which works on photonic quantum chips.
The goal of the Marchigiano venture capitalist is to have the largest pan-European venture capital firm specializing in the initial rounds (pre-seed and seed) of deep tech startups: “I don’t believe in mega funds that become more like private equity. I want to keep supporting young people who leave university and big companies to launch their own ideas.”
As an Italian transplanted to the UK and married to a Spaniard, Perticarari believes everyone on the continent should “stop thinking in terms of Italians versus Brits, Spaniards versus French,” he says during the panel at the London event, in front of Italian founders seeking investors. “We are facing fierce competition with China and the USA, and if we keep thinking this way, we will never win this war. I address startups, institutions, investors, companies: please, let’s think like Europeans.”