K-Sport World raised €5m, Axyon AI, Doorway, Italian LLMs - January 30, 2023

K-Sport World, a sport-tech startup, raised €5m in a round led by Rialto VC. Axyon AI, an AI fintech company, raised €3.9m in a round led by US-based VC firm Montage Ventures and accompanied by The Techshop SGR, alongside other angel investors. Doorway, a crowdfunding platform, 🇮🇹raised €1.76m in fresh capital from CDP VC, Angels4Women, and other business angels. Jampy, a startup developing products for pet wellness, raised €1m in a pre-seed round led by 360cp, alongside other business angels. Volta Structural Energy, an energy storage startup, 🇮🇹raised €1m from Tech4Planet and Leonardo SpA. Cellex, a medtech startup, 🇮🇹raised €830k from Innova Venture and business angels. Weforguest, a travel-tech startup, 🇮🇹raised €500k in a pre-seed round from CDP VC, LVenture, and other investors. On top of that, the startup received €480k in debt instruments. Playtomic 🇮🇹acquired Sportclubby. Xenon Private Equity Small Cap 🇮🇹acquired a controlling stake in Kettydo+, Hic Mobile, and UrbiStat. LLMs are finally speaking Italian! Two open-source models fine-tuned in the Italian language have been recently released: LLaMAntino, released by a team from the University of Bari, is a fine-tuned version of LLaMa 2 (here is the paper, and of course, the models are available on HuggingFace in the 7b and 13b variants). Zefiro is an LLM model fine-tuned to the Italian language based on Mistral 7b. The models are available on HuggingFace, on the author’s page. But we have higher aspirations: Cineca and iGenius (an AI startup) 🇮🇹announced a partnership to create Modello Italia, a foundational LLM built from scratch. Will it stand against the big, deep-pocketed foundational LLM behemoths?