Vento is Italy's most active private early-stage VC, backed by Exor. We've made 200+ investments in 5 years, backing startups with at least one Italian founder as they build globally, and are now deploying our €75M second fund. We're also behind Reef by Vento, our venture building program in Turin, and Wave by Vento, one of Europe's largest tech events with 15,000+ attendees.
Vento Selects is an annual list of the ten best young Italian professionals working at the forefront of global innovation, inside frontier labs, deep tech startups, and the global tech companies where some of the most important work in the field is quietly happening.
Selected individuals are engineers, researchers, and builders, with deep technical expertise, building and researching in complex environments.
An international jury picks the ten names each year. The jury is made by Dorothy Chou, Thomas Wolf, and Michele Catasta.
Referrals are open now, anyone can nominate a candidate, and we'll invite the best profiles to participate to the selection. Refer here.
We've always believed that being investors isn't only about writing checks. It's about amplifying talent, building density, and creating the conditions for something bigger to take hold.
Italy has always had the talent. What it's often lacked is visibility. Vento Selects is a radar: it maps and surfaces people already doing the work, and puts them on the map for the founders, investors, leaders and builders who should know they exist.
Dorothy Chou — Strategic Advisor in Google DeepMind. Created the industry's first AI Transparency Report, now a standard adopted across the tech industry. Active angel investor and talent scout.
Thomas Wolf — Co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face. The scientist who made open-source AI accessible to millions of builders worldwide.
Michele Catasta — President and Head of AI at Replit. Built Replit Agent, taking the product from prompt to working app and driving revenue growth of over 100x. Has backed more than 100 AI companies as an angel investor.