Motor Valley Accelerator: the new automotive startup accelerator established
Modena, 11/04/20, The first Italian accelerator dedicated to the automotive world starts today. The Motor Valley Accelerator is the result of a joint operation of the Accelerators Fund from CDP Venture Capital Sgr - National Innovation Fund, Modena Foundation and Unicredit, and will be led by CRIT, a technology broker from Vignola (MO) with twenty years of experience in research, analysis and sharing of technologies for the industrial sector, including the cars world, and Plug and Play, the largest Open Innovation platform in the world, with over 1400 startups accelerated in 2019 alone and 400 partner companies in 16 countries, including Italy since 2019. The involvement of these two complementary actors, with different but synergistic vocations, is part of a strategy aimed at guaranteeing the start-ups of the program a wide pool of skills and business models to draw on and will act as a contamination between territorial and international know-how.
CRIT will act as core technical partners bringing its long experience on industrial innovation, automotive technologies and due diligence technology activities. These competences will then be combined with the Plug and Play deep know-how in startup acceleration and management .
The program will be based in Modena, in the heart of the Motor Valley, with the aim of helping Italy to play a leading role in a phase of great transitions in mobility, from the electric motor and sustainability in a broad sense to connectivity and autonomous driving.
The start-ups, identified in the pre-seed and seed phase, the embryonic phases of their growth, will receive the support of a structured path towards the validation of their business model by taking advantage of the expertise, the network and the financial investment capacity of the partner of the Acceleratore, with the aim of growing and becoming national champions of innovation in the automotive and motor-tech panorama.
The selected start-ups will have access to a 6-month acceleration path, at the end of which the best ones will be able to receive an additional investment from the Accelerator Fund of CDP Venture Capital Sgr, the Modena Foundation, UniCredit and Plug and Play itself. Italy.
International scale-ups will also be an integral part of the program, following the traditional Open Innovation path aimed at developing pilot projects and integrating them into the operational strategies of companies.
The Motor Valley Accelerator aims to move a total of 20 million euros towards accelerated start-ups by catalyzing international interest in this new innovative pole of the Italian automotive sector.
«I think that our technological knowledge and our propensity for concrete applications due to the habit of working with the industrial world can be of great value for this initiative,» said Marco Baracchi, CRIT Director General.
«We are happy to launch a fourth Open Innovation program just a year and a half after our arrival in Italy. for the first time we will invest directly in Italian startups, in a sector as important for our country as the automotive one - we will bring the mentality of Silicon Valley to the land of motors » comments Andrea Zorzetto, Managing Partner of Plug and Play Italy.
