SETsquared to support Italian start-up

The SETsquared partnership is offer six months’ of business support to an Italian start-up company, SmartRM, after the Turin-based company won the package in a new international competition run by the UK inward investment body, UK Trade & Investment (UKTI).

SETsquared, the research and enterprise partnership of the universities of Bath, Bristol, Southampton and Surrey, joined the ‘UK-Italy Springboard’ initiative to share best practice and increase collaboration with other innovation organisations in Europe. Seven Italian technology start-ups were selected from across Northern Italy and invited to pitch their business plans at an event at Fondazione CRT, a private non-profit organisation in Turin. 

A panel of experts chose digital rights management (DRM) start-up, SmartRM as the winner. The prize, which will involve SmartRM being based at SETsquared’s Southampton Innovation Centre for six months, will be funded by UKTI.

David Bream, Director of the SETsquared Innovation Centre at Southampton, said, “This represents another opportunity to do business across the world, and draw the highest quality start-ups into SETsquared.”

The SETsquared Partnership has four business acceleration centres, located near the university campuses. The centres offer technology based start-ups and spin-outs specialist mentoring advice and support. Collectively, they have helped raise £450 million in investment. 

Four out of every five businesses within SETsquared incubators are from the local community in the UK, but SETsquared also works with centres of excellence in San Diego, Massachusetts, Eindhoven, and Italy. Bream said he is looking forward to the new arrival at the Southampton centre. “We are hoping this pilot will show how our business incubation approach can support a start-up business to get traction in the UK.” 

SmartRM, launched by Filippo Chiariglione in 2009, has developed a content protection solution based on new MPEG audio and visual compression standards, which allows individuals and businesses to share content such as audio, video or PDF files with control over how this content can be used. The service is scalable, and can be provided on a pay as you go basis.

Chiariglione said, “We view the UK as our favourite place to expand in Europe. The size of the venture capital market in the UK is much greater than elsewhere in Europe, and an organisation like SETsquared will be able to help us reach the next level.” 

He continues, “I believe they will not only give SmartRM great support to analyse and understand the target UK market and to define the strategies to reach it, but will also play an important role on the execution side, by introducing the company to a network of entrepreneurs, potential customers, business partners and investors that will contribute to the success of our start-up.”