Alessandro Rizolli told us that after winning the pitch at the last BizSpark Summit they managed to secure substantial investment from Italian company CRIF in February 2012 which should fund them for at least the next year. Their team grew to 14 people across the UK and Italy and now have well-known names on their customer list such as Autodesk, Intuit and one of Europe’s biggest publishers, what? At the moment, they are working on the next version of the Mopapp service– which will be launched later this year and Alessandro says it will definitely help clients increase their market share. They also recently completed cloud migration to the Windows Azure platform.

Alessandro also stated that along with winning a Seedcamp event in 2011, winning the top spot at the European BizSpark Summit certainly helped them raise their profile and impress potential investors. This kind of credibility will continue to be useful in the future. In the short term, the visibility that the Summit gave them has also been very useful, including helping them connect with potential customers.

In terms of what more can be done to help start-ups in these tough economic conditions, Alessandro stated that across different countries in Europe, more needs to be done to give start-ups tax reductions during their early years. As start-ups are creating new jobs, it is in the interest of the European economy to help them, because they are the employers of the future. Governments need to take a longer term view in this respect.

Alessandro will be a guest speaker at this year’s European BizSpark Summit and he has agreed to get involved because he “wants to demonstrate to the start-up community the benefit of being involved in the BizSpark program and attending events like this”.  On top of that, he had a great year and he “wants to give something back – something that (he) believes is need more in the entrepreneurial community.”

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