Viceversa has brought revenue based financing to Italy, a model for funding startups based on turnover: "We bet on their growth by sharing the risks."
Financing startups according to a revenue-based model, so as to share business risk, the good times and any difficulties. It's called revenue based financing – literally "financing based on turnover" – and it was brought to Italy by Viceversa. This is a fintech – a company that combines technology with financial services – founded in 2021 by Matteo Masserdotti and Pedro Salvi, with headquarters in Milan and Dublin.
A company that has conceived a new idea of financing built on transparency and the use of technology: a substantially hybrid form, whereby invested funds are repaid by advancing a share of the future revenue the company will be able to generate. "Essentially," CEO Matteo Masserdotti explains to us, "we selected the best aspects of debt and equity financing and tried to combine them. We bet on the future growth of selected companies and align ourselves with their business." The revenue advance is based on Viceversa's own calculations regarding the company's growth projections, and repayment is tied to the startup's performance: "If the revenues don't come in, we share the business risk and lose our investment, while if turnover increases, so does our income."
The fintech's fee ranges from 5 to 10 per cent interest on the amount lent for digital marketing investments. "In this first phase," Masserdotti emphasises, "we have focused primarily on e-commerce and software-as-a-service." This approach has made it possible to attract clients operating in sectors that rely heavily on continuous promotional spending, whether tourism booking platforms or apps dedicated to offshore sports betting. The decision to focus on digital marketing is driven by the fact that, "since we are working on a percentage of future revenues, this is one of the few tools that allows us to create a forecasting framework for a company's turnover growth, based on historical data and business indicators." In addition to the capital to invest, Viceversa provides the supported startups with valuable information obtained through a bespoke dashboard, enabling the business to perform at its best.
Speed, flexibility and adaptability are the three keywords of the model proposed by Viceversa, with selection and assessment of eligible startups completed within 72 hours and funds – ranging between 10,000 and one million euros – disbursed within a maximum of two weeks from the end of the process. Everything happens online, the moment a potential client connects their accounts to the fintech's platform. "Thanks to artificial intelligence algorithms," the CEO explains, "our analysts can understand almost in real time whether a company may or may not be of interest to us; from that point it takes around three days to formulate an offer."
A process that is entirely digital, agile and flexible, but not for everyone: out of approximately 1,000 applications received to date, Viceversa has funded no more than around seventy companies. Some of these are also part of LifeGate Way, the Italian ecosystem that supports and connects naturally sustainable startups.
On the other hand, "we have approximately €20 million in portfolio, which in just one year is a fine demonstration of the fact that our potential client market is in great need of this type of instrument." At present the process is decidedly selective, because "to choose a startup to back we rely on parameters that are not easy to come by." But, Masserdotti concludes, "we are working on other tools focused on logistics and shipping that could considerably broaden our client base." Potentially, we are talking about a truly vast market: in Italy there are approximately 500,000 small and medium-sized enterprises engaged in online sales. And across Europe that number rises to 4 million.
