Domyn (formerly iGenius)
Uljan Sharka · Milan
Founded in 2016 as iGenius to let companies talk to their own data; now builds AI models and agents for regulated industries.
Italian AI founders: who is building AI companies in Italy
Italy's best-known AI founders mostly build vertical B2B companies, and most of them are in Milan: Uljan Sharka (Domyn), the Lexroom, Jet HR and Skillvue teams, Michele Grazioli (Vedrai), Gianluca Maruzzella (indigo.ai), Massimiliano Squillace (Contents.com) and the Datapizza founders, with Translated in Rome among the longest-running.
I'm Paolo Antonio Rossi (luduvigo), founder of Gorilliin Milan, so I'm one of the people on this map, not a neutral observer. Funding figures come from the press sources cited in the longer Italian version of this page, updated October 2026.
Founders and companies
Lexroom
Paolo Fois, Martina Domenicali, Andrea Lonza · Milan
Generative AI for lawyers, founded in 2023. Announced a $50M Series B in May 2026.
Jet HR
Marco Ogliengo, Francesco Scalambrino · Milan
Automates payroll and HR for Italian companies. Raised a €25M Series A led by Base10 Partners in 2025.
Vedrai
Michele Grazioli · Milan
Founded in 2020; AI that helps small and mid-sized companies simulate the effect of business decisions.
indigo.ai
Gianluca Maruzzella and co-founders · Milan
Started in 2016 among friends at Politecnico di Milano; builds virtual assistants for customer experience.
Skillvue
Nicolò Mazzocchi, Simone Patera · Milan
Assesses candidates' skills with asynchronous interviews analysed by its own AI. €5.5M seed in 2025.
Contents.com
Massimiliano Squillace · Milan
SaaS platform that uses generative AI to produce multilingual content, integrated with CMS and e-commerce.
Datapizza
Alessandro Risaro, Pierpaolo D'Odorico · Milan
Began in 2021 as a data science and AI community, now an AI transformation company. €10M Series A in 2026.
Translated
Marco Trombetti, Isabelle Andrieu · Rome
One of the best-known Italian language-AI companies, behind the ModernMT machine translation engine.
This is not a ranking, and it certainly misses founders who deserve to be here. If someone is missing, write to me.
What they have in common
- —Vertical, not general. Almost none compete on foundation models (Domyn is the exception). They pick one industry, such as legal, payroll or hiring, and build data and workflows around it.
- —B2B first. Customers are law firms, HR teams, SMEs and large companies, not consumers.
- —University roots.indigo.ai started at Politecnico di Milano, Datapizza near Bicocca, and Milan's incubators PoliHub and B4i (Bocconi) sit at the centre of the scene.
Italian founders working on AI and Ethereum
The overlap between AI and crypto is where I spend most of my time. I was CTO of Tide Protocol | Five Elements Labs from 2022 to 2024, and at Gorilli we build AI and Web3 products side by side: Gorillionaire placed in the Top 5 at the Monad EVM Accathon and was selected for the Hook Product Accelerator, while Kommander and LLM Scan are pure AI products. I wrote about that path in Italian in Founder italiani nel mondo Ethereum e blockchain.
Since 2017 I have also run the Milan chapter of Hackers/Founders, a community for founders and engineers, which is how I met many of the people building AI in the city.
FAQ
- Who are some well-known Italian AI founders?
- Among the most cited are Uljan Sharka (Domyn, formerly iGenius), Paolo Fois, Martina Domenicali and Andrea Lonza (Lexroom), Marco Ogliengo and Francesco Scalambrino (Jet HR), Michele Grazioli (Vedrai), Gianluca Maruzzella (indigo.ai), Nicolò Mazzocchi and Simone Patera (Skillvue), Massimiliano Squillace (Contents.com), Alessandro Risaro and Pierpaolo D'Odorico (Datapizza) and Marco Trombetti and Isabelle Andrieu (Translated).
- Where are Italian AI startups based?
- Mostly in Milan, which hosts most of the venture-backed B2B AI startups, with other well-known companies in Rome and around university hubs. Milan's scene clusters around Politecnico di Milano, Bocconi and their incubators PoliHub and B4i.
- What do Italian AI startups build?
- Mostly vertical B2B AI: legal (Lexroom), HR and payroll (Jet HR, Skillvue), decision support for SMEs (Vedrai), customer experience (indigo.ai), content (Contents.com), language (Translated) and models and agents for regulated industries (Domyn).
- Are there Italian founders working on Ethereum and AI together?
- Yes. Paolo Antonio Rossi (luduvigo), who wrote this page, was CTO of Tide Protocol | Five Elements Labs and now builds AI and Web3 products at Gorilli in Milan, including Gorillionaire (Top 5 at the Monad EVM Accathon).
- Who is Paolo Antonio Rossi?
- An Italian tech entrepreneur known online as luduvigo, founder and CEO of Gorilli, a product studio he co-founded in Milan in 2025 with Emiliano Fulli. He has been CTO at several startups and has led the Milan chapter of Hackers/Founders since 2017.