13 Sep
Today, we celebrate the successful closing of a €10 million funding round, led by United Ventures, for Cleafy, our group’s cybersecurity startup focused on banking fraud prevention.
This represents a significant milestone not only for Cleafy, but also for all of us at Moviri and the other companies in our group. Our patient, forward-looking, committed investment in Cleafy embodies our mission: to identify, invest, and nurture technology-driven solutions to enterprise problems.
Today, Cleafy protects over 100 million digital users from financial fraud, validating the effectiveness of our acceleration and spin-off model. We’re proud to have played a part in their success.
The genesis of a partnership: how Cleafy became part of Moviri
More than ten years ago, when I first met Matteo Bogana and Nicolò Pastore, I did not know whether they were going to succeed in their mission to change the world of cybersecurity. What I did know was that they were onto something big: not just stopping fraud, but predicting and preventing it.
Founding Cleafy was a strategic decision. Our mission at Moviri has always been to identify, nurture, and grow promising ideas that leverage cutting-edge technologies to solve complex enterprise problems.
In the past decade, we’ve been focused on those areas where we can harness the power of artificial intelligence to address substantial challenges faced by large corporations. Our belief is that artificial intelligence is set to revolutionize several vital sectors, including enterprise mission-critical ones, like fraud management. Cleafy’s success proves our thesis.
Becoming part of the Moviri group was a necessary step for Cleafy’s evolution. Our innovative model focuses on providing early-stage companies with the right resources and support to hit one milestone after another. We provided Cleafy with strategic guidance and operational support, enabling them to focus on developing their fraud prevention platform.
As important, we helped Cleafy take its first go-to-market steps, supporting its adoption by some of our enterprise customers which became early adopters of Cleafy.
United Ventures' investment in Cleafy
The venture capital investment from United Ventures comes at the perfect moment. Having reached a crucial point in its growth trajectory, Cleafy needs to expand its reach and continue developing its technology. This funding represents a higher gear that will help Cleafy establish itself further in the European market and grow globally.
We believe United Ventures is the ideal partner for this next phase. Their focus on digital technologies and their proven track record of helping startups scale aligns perfectly with Cleafy’s vision and needs. For Moviri, ceding control was a strategic decision that will give Cleafy the space and resources to reach its full potential.
Moviri’s journey with Cleafy may have reached a significant milestone, but it’s far from over. As minority shareholders, we will continue to support Cleafy, cheering them on from the sidelines, and looking forward to the amazing things they’re bound to achieve.
The Moviri “ServTech” incubation model
The success of Cleafy serves as a testament to Moviri’s incubation model.
Since our inception in 2000, Moviri has been focusing on hard and important problems, providing consulting and technology solutions that have significant impact on business and society.
Our combination of consulting services and technology businesses sets us apart in the industry. Our top talent is dedicated to working with our top clients. That’s how we learn as an organization, build our technology vision, and solve valuable real-world problems. In turn, our consulting customers collaborate with us to generate ideas that, in some instances, develop into technology investments and eventually become standalone companies.
At Moviri, our innovation model is designed to accelerate growth and enable startups to reach milestone after milestone. When we do launch, or invest in, a startup, we provide the necessary resources, managerial support, our customer base, relationship, money, services and mentorship, which help companies validate their technology and acquire pivotal customers.
This is how we’ve seen the creation, as spinoff startups, of Caplan, Cleafy, ContentWise, and Akamas, as well as the investment in Arduino.
We have been here before
Caplan
When Moviri was founded in 2000, we started with the goal of changing the way companies manage their technology resources, and built Caplan, a tool that revolutionized capacity planning and became a global leader, helping companies save billions in technology costs and energy.
Caplan was a novel, smart and practical solution to a very big and complex problem. Caplan quickly became a unique product, with a global customer base, that met a widespread need in the enterprise IT market. Its success did not go unnoticed in the industry, and in late 2010, we sold Caplan to Houston-based BMC Software, one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world.
ContentWise
We founded ContentWise in 2007 with a vision to create a software platform that used data to help businesses personalize their customers’ user experience. The company’s first product was a personalization engine for IPTV that used machine learning to predict user intent and recommend video content (i.e. “Netflix in a box”.)
In the years since its founding, ContentWise has expanded its product offering to include a variety of other solutions for personalization. The company has also grown its customer base to include other types of businesses, from video operators and digital media brands to online retailers.
Today, the company’s software is used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide, and the likes of Allente, Mediaset, PCCW, Rinascente, Sky, Telecom Argentina, and Telefonica.
Akamas
IT system performance engineering has become increasingly complex with the rapid advancement of technology. This was our starting point and inspired us to take on the challenge of performance optimization. Our latest venture, Akamas, is revolutionizing the field with the integration of automation and AI.
Akamas’s platform uses advanced machine learning techniques to optimize hundreds of configuration parameters of enterprise applications to increase performance, cut cloud costs and improve their resilience. In the short few years since its funding, Akamas has proven its value with large customers in banking, gaming, travel, SaaS, online services, and more.
Arduino
We joined the IoT revolution because we are convinced it will alter the trajectory of entire industries. Our investment in Arduino is our latest bet, and a tribute to Italian innovation that creates pioneering technologies with big achievements and even bigger aspirations. Last year’s $32 million round of investment in Arduino by Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Renesas, Anzu Partners and Arm, and the more recent additional $22 million invested by CDP, prove the value of our thesis.
What will we incubate next?
As we celebrate Cleafy’s achievements, we look forward to the next opportunity. Our mission at Moviri is to continue to identify and nurture the next game-changing idea. We are actively searching for new opportunities, with the aim of replicating the success story of Cleafy and contributing to a safer and more efficient digital world.
We remain committed to our philosophy of investing in AI-centered solutions that can disrupt mission-critical domains and lead global markets from day one. Our eyes are set on the horizon, ever-ready to discover, invest, and nurture the next Cleafy.
Cleafy’s journey demonstrates that with the right support, innovative startups can become industry leaders, disrupting markets, and paving the way for a more secure digital future.
It’s a journey that we are excited to embark on again.
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