[In Our Programs] Startup Program in Italy: an unprecedented effort to make Flowpay a success
The success of Flowpay, from Italy's Startup Program, is a result from an unprecedented effort. Let's look back at this success.
A wide range of initiatives rewarded by the accession of 25 startups
The inauguration of the program in Italy coincided with a period that was certainly not easy because of the consequences of the pandemic, which put at risk the objectives and investments of many players, large and small, in the technological field and beyond.
A commitment that, in a few months, has led to 25 Italian start-ups to join the Startup Program.
More than 50 online training sessions have been organized, ranging from business and technology training and use-case development to expert involvement in roundtables focusing on key industry trends.
Alongside the direct support to the companies participating in their own Startup Program, OVHcloud has created a series of partnerships with the most important Italian innovation centers and accelerators, such as Polihub Milano, LeVillageByCA Milano, LuissEnLabs, and Innovup,contributing to the promotion of meetings and support activities fundamental to enable young companies to express their full potential.
Participants’ profile: innovation, not just in the North
One of the most interesting aspects, with regard to the startups that have participated in the program over the past year, is related to their area of origin. The 25 companies involved cover a large part of the Italian regions, with a significant presence also of companies from southern Italy. This contrasts with the widespread perception that young innovative companies are only born in the north of our country, while the focus remains on young innovators in Southern Italy able to excel despite the sometimes unfavorable environment for entrepreneurial development.
The fields in which these startups operate are many, ranging from the "traditional" fintech, with the Milanese Hercle, the IOT of the Roman Wise Robotics, passing the Edtech of Cervellotik based in Potenza, to the Artificial Intelligence applied to the Analytics of Contents.com.
Flowpay: a case in point
Among the realities that have benefited from OVHcloud support, a special mention is certainly going to Flowpay, one of the startups that has been most highlighted in the last two years. Born in 2019 with the aim of revolutionizing the B2B payment system, efficiency of invoice management processes, reducing delays and improving the relationships between stakeholders, it has gathered growing support. With a distributed and integrated proprietary platform with e-invoicing providers, the company offers a business service that allows to automate invoice payments based solely on the information contained in SDI, using open banking and partially delegating the company’s financial management service to the system. FlowPay temporarily separates the process of accepting a payment from its execution by an instant transfer, allowing for treasury management logistics and the management of new business relationships to be implemented. This separation makes it possible, for example, to perform forecasting analyzes of systemic data.
Flowpay, the first startup to obtain both licenses from Banca d’Italia to operate as AISP (Account Information Service Provider) and PISP (Payment Initiation Service Provider), was awarded the prize of €50,000 in cloud products guaranteed by OVHcloud, a portfolio that includes hosted private cloud, public cloud storage & compute, Data analysis, AI, Kubernetes. OVHcloud has supported Flowpay in using the selected products, supporting the start-up team with its own experts.
As the CTO of Flowpay Edordo Tommasi pointed out, "The partnership with OVHcloud has allowed us to start a zero-time, minimal effort cloud architecture in Europe, managed with the best open source tools, and extremely light in management".