Primo Climate invests in RARA Factory, a deep tech company developing new materials – at a rate of one hundred per day – to replace rare earths.
For some years now, rare earths have earned a place of honour in corporate strategies and on the geopolitical chessboard. These seventeen chemical elements, indispensable for the semiconductors in electronic devices and for the technologies underpinning the energy transition, are concentrated in a handful of countries, with complicated extraction processes and supply chains exposed to tensions. There is ongoing debate about how to source them, how to recycle them, and how to reduce their impact. Why not replace them altogether?
That is exactly what RARA Factory is working on, a deep tech company founded as a spin-off of Ca' Foscari University of Venice. RARA Factory began 2026 with its first external investment round (seed): a fundraise of 3.2 million euros backed by Primo Capital through the Primo Climate fund, together with Cdp Venture Capital Sgr (via the Fondo Acceleratori) and a group of business angels.
RARA Factory's approach is distinctive because it creates a meeting point between artificial intelligence and experimental materials physics. Unlike other models based exclusively on theoretical simulation, "we do something typical of physicists: we take something real and transform it into a mathematical object," Stefano Bonetti, lead founder and professor of experimental condensed matter physics, explains to LifeGate.
A piece of machinery continuously creates combinations of pure chemical elements (including iron, copper and aluminium), in varying proportions. The properties of these materials are converted into numerical datasets used to train artificial intelligence models, which learn to recognise the most promising combinations and suggest new ones. Test after test, validation after validation, the process becomes progressively faster and more refined.
"We move forward at the rate of one hundred materials per day. We have now surpassed 10,000 – the threshold from which artificial intelligence can truly begin to learn," Professor Bonetti continues. Clearly, only a small fraction of these thousands of materials will have an industrial application: we can picture the flow as a kind of funnel that starts from a vast range of possibilities, progressively filtering out those lacking the desired technical characteristics, those that are too costly, difficult to produce, or unsuitable for any other reason.
"The more you optimise, the more you learn," Stefano Bonetti emphasises. "Once the database and training are complete, we will be able to create materials on demand: a company will ask us for a specific material free of a specific component, and we will be able to provide a prototype within a matter of days." Among the sectors with the greatest need are all those that make extensive use of neodymium magnets, such as the automotive industry for electric transport, the energy sector for wind turbines, and consumer electronics for speakers and headphones. "Without having done any marketing whatsoever, we are already inundated with requests," he concludes. "We are seeing first-hand just how crucial it is for a company to break free from importing rare earths from abroad."
This is precisely the argument that won over Primo Climate, Italy's first venture capital fund focused exclusively on climate tech. "In a geopolitical landscape as complex as the one we are living through, RARA Factory has found a way to free our supply chains from the dependency game when it comes to sourcing critical materials from abroad," comments Simone Molteni, general partner of the fund alongside Giusy Cannone and Ezio Ravaccia. Molteni is also scientific director of LifeGate, which is part of the network of expertise and relationships available to the companies supported by the fund.
The technologies selected by Primo Climate, despite being very different from one another, share certain characteristics. First and foremost, they are already mature; they are Italian, or have growth plans in Italy; and, no less importantly, they deliver benefits in both climate terms and economic and productive terms. RARA Factory fits perfectly into this picture, offering real alternatives to imports from abroad that have proved not to be without risk. "This," Molteni continues, "is the best way to make the industrial supply chains that produce goods essential to our economy more resilient, competitive and secure."