Smartwage, an Italian FinTech startup, introduced the closing of its €2 million pre-Seed funding spherical. The startup goals to remodel conventional company welfare by enabling workers to make use of their welfare credit score with any service provider by its platform.
The spherical was led by Step Fund, the enterprise capital fund managed by Various Capital Companions SGR. The transaction features a complete funding of €2 million, comprising an preliminary €1 million, with a further €1 million dedication from Step Fund, to be deployed in tranches aligned with Smartwage’s money wants and improvement milestones.
Felice Cupane, CTO of Smartwage, mentioned, “We designed Smartwage as a scalable technological infrastructure, able to integrating regulated funds and synthetic intelligence right into a single coherent system. Our aim is to cut back regulatory complexity by automation, information evaluation, and steady mannequin optimisation. This spherical allows us to additional spend money on structure, safety, and the enhancement of our AI methods.”
Smartwage was based in 2024 by Marco Gambardella (CEO), alongside co-founders Felice Cupane (CTO) and Francesco Varuzza (COO). Based on the corporate, company welfare in Italy represents one of many essential instruments for tax effectivity and human capital enhancement, with a market now value over €7 billion throughout advantages and meal vouchers, but nonetheless reaching lower than 50% of workers.
“Corporations adopting structured welfare options report productiveness will increase of as much as 30% and a mean development in income per worker of two.1% for every new service launched. This state of affairs sits inside a broader European market with a complete measurement of €80 billion, representing 32.59% of the worldwide market,” Smartwage talked about within the press launch.
Over 20% of company welfare budgets go unused yearly as a result of inflexibility of present working fashions, which require workers to work inside a restricted community of affiliated suppliers. Smartwage claims that it was created to overturn this paradigm, permitting workers to autonomously spend their welfare credit score with retailers of their selection.
It notes that the know-how developed transforms welfare right into a dynamic and personalised system, by the combination of regulated digital fee instruments, together with playing cards and financial institution transfers and an AI-based assistant performing as a “welfare coach” supporting each workers and employers, with the intention of maximising the affect of welfare investments by way of worker well-being.
Michele Novelli, Accomplice at Step Fund, commented, “We’re investing in a extremely useful crew wherein we’ve already positioned our belief up to now and which has clearly demonstrated its capabilities. At present, 20% of company welfare budgets stay unused and, in line with our estimates, 50% of staff nonetheless lack a devoted plan.
“It is a actual paradox in a rustic the place 62% of workers struggle to make ends meet — a vital difficulty that an intuitive, user-friendly technological answer like Smartwage can lastly handle. This transaction absolutely aligns with Step’s funding thesis, which focuses on the deep transformation of markets enabled by synthetic intelligence.”
With this funding, the corporate plans to speed up the event of its digital platform, strengthen its go-to-market technique, and improve its AI fashions by steady coaching and optimisation.
Smartwage is supported by Zest, a number one Italian operator in pre-Seed investments and open innovation and a accomplice of Step Fund, by a strategic service settlement targeted on governance, monetary planning, and investor community improvement.
