PranaVentures, € 700,000 investment round for the Italian start-up Aryel

PranaVentures led a € 700,000 seed round for Aryel, a do-it-yourself platform for augmented reality marketing campaigns. The company was founded in Italy in 2020 by Mattia Salvi, Luca Petri and Leonardo Persico, and has already reached 5,000 users, most of them (70 percent) international. The platform allows companies to create customized marketing campaigns that take advantage of augmented reality in just a few steps: ranging from the “virtual try on” of fashion and beauty accessories, to the possibility of displaying furniture and furnishing accessories in the space of the home, passing for the three-dimensional display of dishes on menus and interactive gamification experiences. PranaVentures, a venture capital fund specialized in investments in digital and technology companies in the seed and post-seed phase led by Alessio Semoli and Lisa Di Sevo, has subscribed to the capital increase together with a pool of business angels including KF-Invest, Marco Bianchi (former CEO of MOCA) and Alessandro Braga (Chief Digital Officer of Talent Garden). “Aryel was born in 2020 from a market need coming from brands and agencies to consider Augmented Reality projects”, explains Mattia Salvi, CEO of Aryel. “Until that time, it has always been perceived as a technology that required a large investment in terms of budget and therefore reserved only for large companies. Aryel was therefore born with the aim of creating a tool capable of democratizing this innovative technology and making it accessible also to freelancers, SMEs and creative agencies. After a first validation of the market, and release of the MVP, there was the launch and go-live of Aryel all in bootstrap, with the aim of preparing the ground and collecting useful metrics to show the validity of the project to possible investors. . After this first period, we opened a first batch of SFPs to collect the first investments, and given the high interest we encountered, we met with PranaVentures who decided to participate in the growth of Aryel. For us it was an important opportunity to bring to Italy a successful case of fundraising with convertendi, a very common approach abroad and on an international scale in the early stages of a start-up “. AR technology is not still very widespread in Italy as regards the marketing of companies operating in our area. “Abroad we have found a greater awareness of Augmented Reality,” says Salvi. “Aryel was perceived as a very agile tool, which brought concrete solutions to problems that had been encountered with other platforms, such as the complexity of use, the need to develop apps or the lack of content to be included in the immersive experience. In Italy, as well as in other markets such as Greece, Spain, Portugal and France, there is still a culture to be built on AR ”. In Aryel’s future there is also expansion in the US and Asia: “We are dealing with it mainly through our Agency Partner Program, a business model that allows us to exploit the agency market as a channel to reach new customers. We are experiencing great success, as agencies are interested in being able to offer this technology to their customers, without having to hire new figures or invest in expensive and difficult-to-use tools “. Going abroad for an Italian technology company, imagine yourself right away as an international player, these are elements that make the difference: “In Italy, the startup market has been moving at a very fast pace in the last two years”, explains the CEO of Aryel. “It certainly helps to think and position one’s products and services immediately at an international level, thinking big, and therefore not only on a national scale. I think it is really essential to start immediately with a broad approach and not to set geographical limits, which are less and less existing today. “It is estimated that by 2030 AR technology will be increasingly integrated into physical environments, improving shopping experiences and transforming them into a mix hybrid of connected technology: as early as 2021, more than 70 percent of millennials and generation Z have used it. “Aryel is a startup that brings made in Italy skills, technology and innovation to the world”, says Lisa di Sevo, co-founder and CEO of PranaVentures. “We know that AR and VR will be one of the main drivers of the future and we are thrilled to have found a team that has a strong market vision that we have not yet seen to date, capable of growing 600 percent year over year, and to develop SAAS (software as a service) solutions, 70% of which are adopted by customers outside Italy. As PranaVentures, and as our mission, we are happy that Aryel has chosen us as their partner, not just financial, this round wants to further consolidate the global presence of the solution with a particular focus on America and Asia “.