Why Europe Can Win Autonomous Driving: The Niulinx Strategy | Luca Foresti (CEO & Co-founder)

Intro In Europe today, we have ASML as a unique proposition in the world, and this is a problem. Autonomous driving technology is a possibility for us. The problem is, do we believe in it as Europeans? Autonomous driving is about substituting private cars, not substituting taxes. So it's huge. It's about hundreds of billions of income per year in Europe. Speaker 2 Hi, I'm Tom Guinness and welcome to the Raising Your podcast. Here we go behind the scenes with the people building the future of European tech. Today. We welcome Luca Feresti to the show. Luca is the CEO and Co founder of New Links, a high tech company that's developing advanced software and hardware solutions for level 4 autonomous vehicles. The business raised a €38 million seed round earlier this year and are only just getting started. If you want to see where the Italian tech ecosystem is going, you don't want to miss this. Who are you, what you do, and why is it important? Speaker 1 I'm Luca Foresti and I'm the CEO of New Links. Why is it important? I I let other people to say it who I am. I'm a physicist. The first I studied physics in this Italian special university called Scala Normale. And then I I studied another three years as a financial mathematician for the same university and I worked for several years in developing countries and Eastern European countries developing microfinance banks, institutions from scratch. Luca's Path: From Physics & Banking to Healthcare & Startup Studio We were going there and, and asking for opening up a new bank and trying to serve special groups of people. Then I came back to Italy and I built up the first start up as ACEO and founder. It didn't go well because we were doing special software for mobile phones. But in that moment, it was 2005, 85% of the market was Nokia. And then two years later the the world changed and our technology didn't work anymore. And then I started to be the CEO of a small clinical center in 2009. And then for 14 years I was the CEO over there developing from 1 to 44 clinical center from zero to 60,000,000 income. We sold it twice, 1 to a private equity and 2nd to an important insurance. Then finally I went for one year around the world going in places I wanted to know and or that I saw many years before like China, India, United States, East, West, Argentina, Turkey and so on. I came back and I built up a start up studio building new start-ups from scratch with the specific viewpoint in which I was Co founded together with the team. But I was not operational everyday. And then in July 2025, I met this university professor called Sergio Salvarezi in Milan and he was working since many years in automation for cars and in particularly in autonomous driving. So we met, we clicked somehow, and after a few days he's asked me to be the CEO of a start up, taking out from the university basically all his team and building up a company. I accepted. It was, yeah, very exciting as an idea. And the since that moment we worked for building up a business plan, presenting it to investors and getting the money you need for starting up such a such a game. And after seven months, we closed the investments and we got these 38 millions and we started and this is more or less in 5 minutes my story. Speaker 2 Where did your entrepreneurial journey begin? I know that you're a scientist by background. Speaker 1 I was thinking about what they wanted to do in life. During the university, I was studying physics and during those years I understood that all the people around me were able to do in minutes what I was able to do in weeks. And this made me think about what I wanted to do. And basically I decided to work for being an entrepreneur, director, movie director and a politician. No, And basically I started from the first. So entrepreneurship and after my studies, as soon as I could, I built up my first start up. Speaker 2 So not a movie director. Speaker 1 Yeah, not now. I need another 7 to 10 years at least for having new links successful, but afterwards it may be an idea. Speaker 2 So could you tell us about the story of how new links began? You know, what was the aha moment or kind of the spark of inspiration that the team and and you had to really go after this. Speaker 1 This is more about what happened before me before my end, my entering in the in the New Links era, because it was basically an idea of the team. And the idea is fairly simple. You can do fantastic things in the university doing R&D, but then at a certain point when you see the players around the world working on autonomous driving, you realize that you need tons of money, tons of people. The Origin Story: Spinning Out Niulinx from University R&D And therefore it's impossible to go on inside the university developing something that is meaningful in that arena. And therefore the only possibility is to spin off the team and to start up something with enough money. That was the idea at the very beginning. Then the other point is, OK for doing what exactly? For going where? And we are in Europe, we are not in United States, we are not in China. And therefore, it's fairly difficult here to talk to investors and say, look, we need 10 billions for arriving to a meaningful technology, for being competitive with way more and other guys. So you need to develop a different mindset and a different way to approach the market in this arena. And here the idea again is fairly simple. Europe is a super difficult place in terms of rules, in terms of laws. And this is one of the reasons, maybe the main one, why important international players are not really entering in Europe as of today. And this is 1 possible competitive advantage for us. We know this place. We know the difficulties you have for having all the rules well organized around what you're doing and that therefore this is 11 first point. And the second point, we realized that that you can arrive to the full robotaxi concept in steps and you may arrive to the market in a step in which you don't have to invest the billions, but you can invest the hundreds of millions. And this is the robot sharing concept that we developed and in which we believe we can. We can enter in the market in a fairly short time frame. We think that in three years we can arrive to the market. Speaker 2 In three years, yeah. What specific angle have you you taken to attack the, you know, autonomous vehicle space? Speaker 1 So the first point is speed. If you limit the speed of your cars, the risks and the technical difficulties you have are less. That's basic physics. I mean, it's nothing more than if you go at 30 kilometers per hour in less than 3 meters, so you can stop the car. If you go to 50 kilometers per hour, you need 12 meters. And these are small changes in in in speed, allow you to understand that that if you limit your speed, it's a totally different game. The second point and why Waymo and other guys are spending tons of money are edge cases. Solving L4 Autonomy: Low Speed, Remote Ops & The Robo-Sharing Model So if you need a software that a soft and a hardware that is able to manage all possible cases, the amount of money you have to invest for doing it is in the range of billions as of today. I, I, I, I don't think someone that knows this business can say something different than that. But if you start saying that you can use people for managing the false positive and you, you allow yourself from a business viewpoint to use a lot people. And so to have a bunch of people able to enter into, into the game when the car is not able to understand what to do, then you don't need to manage all those edge cases. And therefore you are changing billions in CapEx with the comma something in OpEx. And this was an important point for us. Third Point, if you try to have robot taxis in Europe, I don't think that for a while you can escape the point of getting a a taxi license. And getting a taxi license in Europe is not the same than in China or in United States. That's a different game in particularly in Italy, but not only in Italy, also in other, in other countries. Therefore, you need a business model in which you are not a taxi and our business model is not a taxi is a car sharing in which the car goes to the person and not the person goes to the car. You don't need a taxi license and therefore you can enter in the market much faster than people that would like to do robotaxis. The last point is how easy or difficult is the homologation path? And again, if you your speed is low, if you manage all false positive with people, then it should be easier to get the homologation from Ministry of Transportation of various countries in in Europe. So this is basically the idea money speed, not a taxi and therefore we can arrive to the market in a very short time frame compared to whoever is saying, OK, we have a robot taxi company and we would like to be competitive with way more in the market tomorrow morning in Europe. I don't believe in such a sentence without something between one to 10 billions in financing. Speaker 2 One to 10 billion. Speaker 1 Yeah, somewhere there, it depends on various issues, but I don't believe in in in 20,000,050 millions financing and you arrive in the market, It's not about experimenting robotaxis. You can do a lot of experiments with 20 millions 30,000,000, no, no problem, no issues. But when you motivate it, that is a different game and therefore you need tons of money. Speaker 2 Right. And so speaking about other approaches in the market, you know who else is out there and what kind of solutions are they using to tackle robo taxis in Italy, in Italy, Is there anyone else or is there as? Speaker 1 Far as I know, nobody is aiming at homologation in Italy, several are aiming at homologation in Europe. But the point is with which technology, if you use Chinese technology and and you put your car so behind it, fine. But it's a different story. It's not European technology. And without European technology, we are going in the autonomous driving industry in the same direction we had so far in AI, in operating systems and all stuff. Basically, in Europe today, we have only a ASML as unique proposition in the world and this is a problem and robot and not robotaxiautonomous driving technology is a possibility for us. The problem is, do we believe in it as Europeans or we say, OK, we have lost, it's a Chinese and an American game. European Sovereignty: Why Europe Needs Its Own AV Tech We as European are not able to develop such a technology. OK, I, I believe and I think that we can do it and therefore we built up new leagues. Speaker 2 And so what's required to ensure kind of European sovereignty within autonomous driving? Speaker 1 Several things. Money, I told you, keeping here talents, I believe in Europe we have the best talents in the world. Those talents at present are going to United States and we need to keep them here. So we have to pay them. We have to let them work in a situation in which they can use their talent and develop fantastic technology. Then we need some kind of understanding in the European Commission and in the countries that autonomous driving is not an evolution of driving. They are, they are managing this problem in terms of, OK, let's take all the rules we have for cars and we use those rules with small changes for autonomous driving. This is a mistake. Autonomous driving is a totally different situation, a totally different technology and therefore you need to apply over there something different. It's more similar to flying. It's more similar to all the evolution that we had when the first the planes, commercial planes started to go around. The reason is quite simple. Autonomous driving is a different game, is that in normal driving you have 1,000,000 cars, 1,000,000 drivers and therefore you have to manage the rules for this situation. In autonomous driving you have 1,000,000 cars, 1 driver and this makes a huge difference from various viewpoints and you can't simply take the rules you have for normal cars and apply them on autonomous driving cars with small changes. This is a mistake and I hope that Europe will understand that and will apply a different approach. Last point, we need as Europeans to understand that we can't go on having 27 different rules in Europe. If you want to enter in the entire territory, you need one rule, one way to approach autonomous driving, one office in which you go and ask for experimentation and for homologation and so on, and you can then go everywhere without any problem. This is a long way for Europe, because at present it's not like that. Each country wants to put the mouth on on on this issue and every time it does small differences that each country want to apply. Speaker 2 Right. And so when we think about the market size for new links, how big is the market opportunity? Is it Italy and Europe and beyond? It's. Speaker 1 Europe mainly it can be beyond. But before thinking beyond, let's stay with our feet on the ground and let's talk about Europe. And the market size in Europe is super huge. Why? Because we are, we we should not think about the taxes in Italy. I give you a few numbers. In Italy we have a 45,000,000 cars, 25,000 taxes. Regulatory Realities: Aviation Lessons & Overcoming 27 Fragmented Rules So there are three zeros, No 3, order of magnitude between these two groups. If you think about taxes, this is a small business, even if Uber is big but is a super small business. If you think about private cars is a huge business, and autonomous driving is about substituting private cars, not substituting taxes. It's about convincing families at the beginning that instead of having three cars in the family, they can keep one and the other two not buying the car but using autonomous driving fleets for their needs. So it's huge. It's about hundreds of billions of income per year in Europe. The, the, the, the exact number is difficult to say and particularly is difficult to say because we should we, we, we should say exactly when are we talking about. Not at present is super small because it is at the beginning, but at the end the idea is substituting all private cars. So at the end the amount of money and business in that is super huge. How long will will it take? 20 years, 30 years, 40 years? I don't know, but more or less 10s of years you will arrive at substituting all private cars using. Speaker 2 Autonomous fleets as well will likely open up more car usage rather than less. Speaker 1 Yes, for very simple reason to understand, because let's say that you have the same number of people and let's say that those people needs exactly the same mobility needs that they have today, OK. Today they, they self drive the car and the car moves from one point to the other, it stops there and it stays there waiting for the person getting the car and going somewhere else. And this creates a certain number of kilometers that you have around. When you have fleets, the car arrives to a point, the person get out of the car and the car moves autonomously going to the next person. This is around 30% more in terms of kilometers. So for this reason you have a little bit more kilometers than compared to the private ones. But of course the number of cars out there is more or less 110th. So if today we have 45 millions cars in Italy, in a world in which you have only fleets around, you will have a 4.5 millions cars. 110th. Why? Very simple because today on average a car does 8000 kilometers per year and with fleets a car will do around 50 thousand 60,000 kilometers per year and therefore you will have a turn around of cars that is much faster than today. Today more or less one car survive around 20 years. We will go towards a world in which one car will survive five years because it will be used a lot and then changed again. Wow. So it's. Speaker 2 Going to be a very different world. Speaker 1 Different, very different world. Much better than today. In particularly, we will not have all our streets full of cars parked around in. In Italy you have two peaks at 8:00 in the morning. At 7:00 in the evening you know where you have the the the most of the cars around. OK. At peak, the number of cars driving around in Italy is an average 10% of the total amount of cars at peak. So out of the peaks you have much less. During the night you have almost nothing. All those cars are parked where 60% in the streets, 40% in garages. So basically if you take a picture from from top in a city, the majority of the space you see are parked cars. Market Size: Replacing Private Car Ownership Across Europe This doesn't make any sense. I mean that that space should be for people walking, biking, kids playing. I don't know, this kind of stuff. I couldn't. Speaker 2 Agree more, especially if someone from the countryside where there's green grass and rolling hills and all of this. Hey everyone, taking a quick break from today's episode. If hosting Raising Europe has taught me one thing, it's that a founder's real job is in resource management, balancing your cash, your time, and your team's focus. That's exactly why we built Frontier Stack, so your business can grow faster and spend smarter. You get access to the growth stacks the top founders across our ecosystem are already using to outpace the market, giving you preferential access to tier one tools and services like Airwallex's competitive FX rates, Whisper Flows productivity suite, and Velocity's incredible paid advertising engine. Stop guessing and grow faster head over to get frontierstack.com right now join the wait list and lock in your priority access pass so you can grow faster and spend smarter. That's get frontierstack.com so bringing it back to today. You know how exactly does the new links product work today? In plain English today we. Speaker 1 Have our cars going around with our software and our hardware on it with safety driver. Because in Italy, but basically in the entire Europe, when you are in the experimenting phase, you need a safety driver on on board. It has a certain number of false positive. During a false positive, the safety driver take control of the car and decides what to do. We are, we are coming from the university team that had these authorization from Italy. We are waiting in hours the authorization for new links. And so immediately after we can have our cars going around. We are deciding exactly which car platform are we going to use and we are thinking a lot about the dimension of the cars in Europe. And our gut feeling is that in the long run, in a country, in, in, in, in a bunch of countries in which the the average number of people in a car is 1.3. It doesn't make too much sense to have big cars going around in a fleet. For various reasons, energy usage, dimension in the streets, the the fact that to doing the false positive, a small car can stop by and without taking too much space and allowing other cars going around. Therefore, we are thinking about developing an L7L7 platform, meaning a platform for two people. So a small platform, electrical of course, that can be easily built with the sensors and actuators for the autonomous driving business. So here is where we are, but keep in mind that we started on the 10th of April. So we are around the two months after that. And at the beginning in in, in Europe, you have to build up the company, you have to sign the contracts with the people, you have to do to take the office space and you have to do these bullshit. And we did it where there. Speaker 2 Was testing last year in Brescia. How did the team build that MVP and where's the product today? Speaker 1 They built it as you can do in an R&D university team. So you buy sensors available, you build up your cars. You don't care at at that moment about homologation, You care about the technology, you care about having something that can go really in the streets and without risks for the people, of course. And they did it. They simply did it. It was a fantastic job for from their side. Today we have a different problem. We have to take that experience and we have to move to a homologable structure. So we need to, I don't know, certify the sensors we need certified the actuators we need everything that when we arrive in front of a Ministry of transportation in Europe can be homologated. Fleet Dynamics: 10x Utilisation & Reclaiming City Space And this creates a different engineering problem that we didn't have, they didn't have in the university. So that's that's the situation we are working hard for selecting all parts that are homologable in putting those parts on our cars and trying to have something that from scratch is able to be homologated at least from a harder viewpoint. And of course the difficult part is the softer viewpoint. And here we have our team working on on all specific areas of autonomous driving perceptions, localizations and so on. We have a software for managing remotely the car and we have people managing remotely the car doing false positive and so on. Well, yeah, huge. Speaker 2 Congrats to the team on on that initial testing and you know, where are you on your technical road map today and you know, how do you see the road map progressing over the coming years? Speaker 1 OK. Today, as I said to you, the first point is to decide which platform is the best platform for going to a motivation. And this is taking today the, the, the maximum of our brain power and analysis and understanding and discussions not only internal to new links, but also with let's say companies that are helping us, consulting us because they have already experienced, you know, model gating, not L4, but maybe L3 or L2 plus and so on, trying to understand what in their experience is possible to do. So today we are deciding which platform and we are deciding exactly how many sensors, which sensors, where you put the sensors, so which computer you want to have on board and so on. For again going from an R&D concept to homologable engineering concept, something, something that is really able to be homologated. Then we will start the experimentations in the streets as fast as possible. We are opening up a second local office in Munich. We have the first local office in Milan, Chetnos Kosunavili, where we are now. We think that Germany is in Europe at present the place where you want to be for confronting yourself also with other players, with other startups, with automotive industry and so on. Of course, Germany is the most important European market for automotive and where almost you have a lot of know how expertise, people that are very good in various parts. So you want to be there and we will like to do the experimentation in Germany as well, not only in Italy. At the beginning, in our business plan, we have 5 different countries in which we want to experiment. Why 5? Because you wanna experiment not only the technology, but also the relationship with the local municipalities, local countries, to understand from a financing viewpoint what you have in Europe around. And again, we are from scratch from the beginning, a European company, not an Italian company. And and if you want to have a European company, you need European investors and you need European operations. Micro-Mobility Engineering: Building L7 Platforms & Brescia MVP And therefore this is what we are trying to do. Speaker 2 Diving into the financials a little bit more, how do the unit economics of the business work today and then how do you see them evolving over time? You know how is new links going to eventually make money OK. Speaker 1 Today we are in the R and Dr. and D phase and therefore there are no income. Yeah, the robo sharing approach, we think that the best way to tackle it is with the kind of franchising business model approach. Well, we are the franchisor and we find the franchise in the local communities. So companies, organizations, local municipalities, why not that buy from us cars that are ready to go around in AD in autonomous driving mode, fully serviced from remote from us for the false positive management. And therefore we sell the cars to the franchise and we ask the franchise a certain amount of money per kilometer done. And there the franchise decides the pricing and the decides also the different group of people that they want to serve. Sometime you may want to serve, for example, elderly people, people with physical problem kits and so on. Sometimes you want to serve everyone around. At the beginning. I am confident that this kind of technology have to find out in the society, among the people, how they are willing to use it. It's not, it's not obvious that people out there will arrive, the typical robo taxi robot sharing a car and they will jump on it and they will use it for everything. It's not clear to me and I don't think it's clear for everyone. If you are sincere, if you think sincerely about that. Therefore, we have to find out the community by community, local space, by local space, how they are going and willing to use it. And then you learn, you learn from one example, second examples and so on. And you enlarge the business, OK, at a certain point you will be present in a certain large area, in certain small areas, no cities, city centers and so on. And then you will start thinking, how can I enlarge the space where my fleets can go? And you can do it in our technology, connecting these small areas with two streets. Why 2? Because 1 can be closed at a certain point and you need a second for connecting it. And when you do it in the robot sharing approach, we didn't talk about it. What what is robot sharing approach is the car arrives at 30 kilometers per hour maximum where the person is. The person jump on the the, the, the driving seat of the car and it drives itself the car and it goes where he or she wants arrives without parking, get out of the car and the car go back in the fleet. So what does it mean this that the 30 kilometers per hour speed limit is only for the autonomous driving part. But when the people drive themselves the car, you don't have any speed limit and you can go everywhere you want. Simply when you arrive, you should be in an area that is covered by our service, no? Therefore, if you have one city covered and another city covered and you have two streets connecting covered, the people can get the car here and go in another city here and let the car there. You may have at a certain point non equilibrium among the cars here and the cars here. Therefore, for example, during the night when people don't use basically cars, you re equilibrate the number of cars along the streets. So that's the the idea and the business model is as many cars we can sell and serve and of course the more money and business we can do and our local partners can do as well. European Expansion: Opening Munich & Testing in 5 Countries And so how much would one of those, you know, rides cost for a an individual or drives? Speaker 1 Good, good question. So let's start from the present numbers and let's arrive to the goal. So which numbers are interesting and important for answering to this question? The first number is how much does it cost a taxi? And the taxi in Europe costs something between 3.5 and 4.5 euros per kilometer, depends on the country and depends on many different things. Then the second number that is important is how much does it cost that today a private car. And of course what you want to see is the total cost of ownership. So you put together how much does it cost the car, the insurance and all the cost, maintenance, energy whatever. And more or less, given the number of kilometers, given the cost of the cars and so on, you arrive at around €1.00 per kilometer. OK, So that €1.00 per kilometre is a limit super interesting to, to, to, to work with the, when you think about autonomous driving. So if you are over it, let's say 1.52 euros, then for people using the car is not economically advantageous to, to, to, to, to go with the fleet. If you go below it, then it, it's, it's a different story. So I think we should arrive at point €5 per kilometer as a goal. No, Therefore you need operations and you need assets that are not very expensive. So, and in the long run in the in the competition among different place in autonomous driving, I have the total feeling and understanding that whoever will have less EUR per kilometer will win in the long run in the market. Therefore, it's very important the dimension of your cars, the cost of them, they also how much energy they're going to use there for the weight. And so that, that, that that's the idea. So my goal is at a certain point in the future .5, I will be happy if at the beginning of our business we will arrive at 1:00 and then of course, we will go down in cost and therefore in price for the final customer. Speaker 2 Right. So it's not only the economics of of autonomous driving, but there's also the physics and physical elements of it with the cost of the absolutely. Speaker 1 I'm a physicist, so I always think for first principles and if if you have a car that is 2 tons, 3 tons and, and it it takes a lot of square meters in the streets, it's impossible to do certain things. And among those things is to have a low price. Speaker 2 So the economics of autonomous driving, you know, isn't just dollars and cents or EUR and cents, but it's also a physics problem. You know, Who were the people helping to create this new platform? How is the team structured and how do you see that evolving over time? Unit Economics Deep Dive: Hitting €0.50/km vs. Taxis and TCO OK. So first in this phase of our company, we need engineers, mathematicians, physicists, people that are able to develop technology. We are not yet in a moment where we will have a lot of operations. This will arrive as soon as we homologate and we enter into the market. The team will evolve towards a more operational team. OK, then we will need other kind of experiences. We we, we will go on having a bunch of engineers developing the technology, but then together with them we will have another team developing the operations. Therefore, today those engineers are basically divided among five areas that are the typical areas that you have in autonomous driving. First, we need people dealing with hardware, with the car, with the sensors, with the computer on board, with the actuators. And this is a first group. Second, we need people dealing with the localization. So we need to know where the car is. Without that, you, you can't go anywhere. We need the people to work with, with the perception. Therefore taking data from sensors, you have to translate those data in intelligence. So there is a person over there, there is a car over there, that's the speed that that's the distance and so on. So perception. And then you need people that help you to decide what to do. So turn right, turn left, accelerate, stop and so on. Finally, the fifth group of people are dealing with remote control of the car. So there's all these technologies in with in which you compress data because not always you have a 5G at the maximum download and upload speed everywhere in the city. So you need the good technology for the compression and when when you have such a technology, you need then the possibility remotely to have a person that see what is going on and decides which which way the car should go on over that particular false positive. For me the false positive is the software knows that doesn't know. So the software understand that is not able to manage that specific situation. Therefore it goes in the safety mode and it stops there and help for people taking taking care of what to do. So these are the five groups of people we have. Of course, we have one had for each of them and we have one team for each of them with different numbers because there are certain areas that needs more people and certain areas that needs less people. So we are managing, developing. At present we have 50 people working. Today again we are in the second month. We have in the business plan 100 people in 12 months and we have 200 people in 24 months. So we are aiming and working for building a huge team of engineers. I mean huge. Let's talk about it. If you take Zooks, they have 4000 people. I mean, if you take Wave, I don't know exactly now how many hundreds of people they have. So the big competitors around the world have a different 0 compared to us as of today. But we are start up, we start from zero and we should arrive there. So that's the pace we are willing to to keep from now on. Speaker 2 So how do you attract and retain the best talent aware that it's going to be, you know, it's not only, you know, competition for your mileage, but also for talent. So we. Speaker 1 Pay well and we have stock options for everyone. These are the basics. Without that, it's fairly difficult in this arena that is high tech, let's say, to attract talents. Then we create a culture in which each person that comes over here has the possibility to influence what is going on. Team Structure: The 5 Engineering Pillars of Autonomous Systems Each person has I, I, I always use this concept, you know, local, enlightened dictatorship. So dictatorship meaning that for each decision there is one person taking it. Local means that the area in which the person take the decisions is limited, is local, is about his responsibilities. Enlighten it because each person should take those decision not alone closed in A room, but should go around and talk to the people and understand their opinion and understand the stakeholders, what they think about things and so on. And the final decision should should take into consideration other people ideas and and other concepts, you know. So this kind of culture, in my opinion is a fantastic place where you want to be because if you have talent, if you are able to, let's say, influence what is going on in such a culture, you can do it. So therefore, I hope and I think that word of mouth, the people working here and the people that do meetings with us that see what we are doing will attract that kind of talents. So people that want to be dictators, local enlightenment and. Speaker 2 You're being here in the new Links office in Milan. It's a real family feeling here walking through the office which you're creating, which is fantastic to see. Thank you very much. Speaker 1 To the people. Speaker 2 Who are supporting the team and, you know, financing the business? Huge congratulations on your €38 million financing round led by your CDPA 2A and with the likes of Pirelli and a handful of other, you know, leading investors and suppliers within the space. How did that come about and what was the story of the fundraiser from A? Speaker 1 Certain viewpoint. A typical story of fundraising. You have a deck. You send your deck around and you talk to hundreds of people. You get feedback. Some of those feedbacks are good, some others are bad, some others are dubious. And the feedback after feedback, you learn about the other people perception about what you are doing. And eventually you also change something along the way because you understand that certain words and certain goals are not so interesting for investors, but others are. So from this viewpoint is a typical start up financing round. From another viewpoint is a totally different game. I did several rounds in my life before and so I had the the Super typical experience. Now you go to typically VC fund, you try to convince AVC fund to be lead investor to do all the technical work for preparing the documents and so on. And then you have followers. This is this is the typical round. In our case, it was totally different because we understood that the typical VC fund was not ready to finance such a deal in Europe today. Culture & Hiring: The "Local Enlightened Dictatorship" So we had to change approach and at the end our lead investors are a multi multi energy company A2A and the CDPCDP for for foreigners is the leading financing unit in Italy for VC venture capital because it's basically public money, but used for venture capital feeding and not only venture capital, they do a bunch of stuff and they have hundreds of billions on the management. Not all of them unfortunately are in venture capital, but some of them are in venture capital. The fund that invested in US is an AI oriented fund with 500,000,000 under management. And we were, I think the second or the 3rd or the 3rd investments that they did. And then going on they, they together they put 20,000,000 out of 38 millions. And then we had to find out if the market was ready to help us. And we find out. We, we, we found that there were companies interested in putting their hands and their feet inside the autonomous driving business like the Italian railway main company Pirelli working with tires and some financial investors, OK. We had one VC fund invest that invested in us as follower and we were able at the end to convince other investors to put another 1818 millions in that and we closed the round in that moment. So again, from a certain viewpoint, the typical story, from another viewpoint, we understood that that we couldn't simply finance it like any other, any other start up. And another point is we wanted to build up an arena of investors that were well representing the society, the needs, what was going on out there. Because this is not only a technological challenge but is also a cultural challenge. And you need the trust. Building trust with other players that are already in the market since many years that are already serving customers in various ways is easier than than else if you had. Speaker 2 To distill that entire experience of fundraising into one golden rule, what would it be? Speaker 1 Try as much as possible to tell the truth to investors. So not not you should not put yourself in a sales mode and enlarge your ego and your expectations because you want to sell a fantastic idea on vice vice versa. Securing €38M: Pitching to Investors On the other side, I particularly was there saying how difficult would be to do what we are doing and all the complexities and there are complexities everywhere in you know, there are complexities in the rules, there are complexities in the technology, the insurance arena, people attracting talents it it's a super complex business. But if you are sincere and you present a very pragmatic way to deal with this complexity, then I think that investors like it like it and understand that you will fight there till the end for having this company successful. If instead you go saying HA, in six months we will be in the market with less money, we could. I was also also saying always like, you know, we need hundreds of millions. This is the first round. No way we can we can go down. We need at least three years, maybe 4, maybe 5, I don't know, at least three years. And because it takes time to do this. So to be sincere, I think is the best way to approach an investor because at the end, many, not all of them, but many are clever people and they have a lot of experience. They saw already many startups and they know how difficult it is to do these things. And they want to see that you, as ACEO, understand that, you know, that's in one, one sentence, more than one sentence. Speaker 2 So you mentioned that you know this will take hundreds of millions and this is just the first round. What's next for the business and when do you think you'll need this, the next tranche of capital so the. Speaker 1 First steps are pretty easy to understand. So to get the authorisation for doing the experimentation, to put the cars in the streets, to start making kilometres and to define all the technological hardware parts that you are going to use and the software development approach you're going to have. This will take several months and we aim to do the second round in 12 to 18 months. Then if if you do that and you arrive at that point, then it will start the the technological very difficult part. That is the one in which you have to fix 1 by 1 all the use cases. So you have to be able to go in the streets and and and to approach every, not every possible use case. Because as I told you, the the edge cases and all the case, one case every 100,000 kilometers is something that most likely is out of our aim now. In the future we will get there, but now this is too rare and we will let that case to a person managing it. But if there is one case every 1000 kilometers, 20,000 kilometers, then you have to fix it and to have the software that is able to to manage it. The Golden Rule of Fundraising: Absolute Sincerity with Investors This will take another 12 months, something like that. And in between we have to go through all the homologation paperwork. That is by itself hard stuff. Just just to understand in Europe how to do it is not easy, but you have to do it and we are doing it. We started already, by the way. So in parallel, we developed the technology, we do the paperwork, we understand which kind of paperwork we have to do. And as soon as the technology is ready, we we, we go in front of that office representing the papers and saying, OK, we're ready for that. Amazing. Speaker 2 So clear steps for the next 12 to 18 months. Solving a really hard problem, but one worth solving outside of building the business. Who is Luca Ferresti? What do you do for fun personally? Speaker 1 You're asking several things. I have a family, 3 kids, and for me it's a lot of fun. I do sports, I have tons of friends, I like travelling around the world and in particular I like biking. So with my family, I did several trips in Europe along the rivers for fun, like the Danube or you know, the the lawyer or other other stuff. So then the day is over. So I I don't have time anymore. So these are more or less the things I like to do. What's your favorite film? Speaker 2 My. Speaker 1 Favorite film is most likely Citizen Kane. Speaker 2 Amazing film. What's one book that you would recommend to others? Speaker 1 Tons of them. Just one, let's say thinking slow and thinking fast. It's a very important book in understanding how we decide how we live. And again, it's this fast and slow decision making processes how important are for us. I loved it like the. Speaker 2 Daniel Kahneman, book, Yeah. Speaker 1 Daniel Kahneman. Yeah, Amazing. Speaker 2 Book What's the single best piece of advice that you could give to other founders and entrepreneurs The. Speaker 1 Reason why startup fail is because founders stop trying. It is the single the only reason why startup fails. So when you enter in a in in, in a world in which you want to be a founder, ask yourself very carefully if you are willing and able from that moment on to go on no matter what. Next Capital Tranches, Citizen Kane & Why Startups Really Fail If you start thinking that maybe something strange happened and so on, I will stop working on it and so on. Or if you start thinking now I work on that two years and then I sell it to someone and so on, most likely this is not for you. That's the most simple suggestions. Speaker 2 Well, Luca, thank you so much for joining the show today. It's been a pleasure. Thank you and wishing you and the team all the best in the future. Speaker 1 Thank you very much. That's a wrap. Speaker 2 For today's episode of Raising Europe, thank you so much for tuning in. And as always, remember your biggest edge as a founder comes down to resource management. If you want to stop guessing, head on over to get frontierstack.com right now. Join the way. Lock in your Priority Pass now so you can grow faster and spend smarter. 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