Plino, the start-up that simplifies and speeds up the analysis of accounting, costs, revenues, and cashflow data for SMEs through generative artificial intelligence, has closed a €650,000 funding round.
Founded in 2023 within Vento, the venture-building program based in Turin, Italy, the company secured initial investment from Exor Ventures, later followed by Berkeley SkyDeck Europe - UC Berkeley’s accelerator in partnership with Cariplo Factory and Lendlease - and by a pool of Italian investors led by Techaround.vc, with participation from Zooga.vc and several business angels, including CFOs and accountants.
The growth of the start-up
The capital raised will allow Plino to accelerate the development of its platform with new AI-based features, such as cash flow forecasting, automatic generation of natural language reports, and profitability analysis for individual products or projects.
At the same time, the start-up will strengthen its team - currently composed of nine people across product, technology and sales - and aim to consolidate partnerships with professional firms and trade associations, bringing AI-driven innovation into the accounting profession itself.
“We chose to invest in Plino because it represents the perfect combination of a determined, multidisciplinary team and one of the most relevant yet overlooked challenges of the Italian economy: financial planning and analysis for SMEs. The market is vast, still largely untapped, and the timing is right: more and more SMEs are realizing the need to structure financial management in a more rigorous and strategic way,” explained Pietro Invernizzi, Managing Director of Techaround.vc. “Plino’s solution stands out for its ease of use, making it accessible even to entrepreneurs and managers with limited digital literacy, lowering the technological barrier that has often the hindered adoption of similar tools. Combined with a solid product vision and a data-driven approach, this convinces us that Plino can become a benchmark in the Italian market and successfully scale across other European markets as well.”
AI for financial planning and analysis
Incubated since 2024 in I3P, the Innovative Companies Incubator of Politecnico di Torino, Plino was founded by Pietro Galimberti (1998), Viola Bonesu (1999) and Enrico Castelli (1997) - three young professionals recognized in Forbes Under 30 (2024). They chose to combine diverse backgrounds - from philosophy to engineering, from finance to artificial intelligence - to prove that the intersection of disciplines is where the most innovative business solutions are born.
Together, the three founders decided to tackle one of the biggest and most underestimated challenges for Italian SMEs: financial planning and analysis, which is often slow, manual and based on incomplete information.
“One of our clients in the food sector told us they used to spend over 10 hours a week manually reclassifying revenues and costs to identify their largest customers, best-selling product families and cost-absorbing areas. Managing five bank accounts was also entirely manual, without real-time visibility on cash flows. With Plino, this entire process has been automated, and managers now make strategic decisions in seconds, with clear, always up-to-date data,” explained Plino’s founders. “And cases like this are not isolated: every day we meet dozens of companies in sectors ranging from manufacturing to construction, from hospitality to food service, facing the same difficulties. Our goal is to help them say goodbye to manual processes and Excel spreadsheets, replacing them with reliable insights for informed strategic decisions.”
Italian SMEs face a fragmented process on a daily basis: scattered data across accountants, management software and banks; manual analyses spread over dozens of Excel files; and waiting times that force managers to rely on intuition rather than numbers. Plino aims to overturn this logic, offering a single platform that enables real-time monitoring of sales, costs, revenues, and cash flows, as well as forecasting future liquidity and automatically generating clear, immediate reports.
Today, Plino already supports more than 100 SMEs across Italy in strategic sectors such as manufacturing, services, food, hospitality and construction. With this round, the startup aims to consolidate its presence in Italy, enrich the product with new areas of analysis such as labor costs and production performance, and further expand the team. The vision is clear: to bring SMEs an immediate, error-free system for making strategic, data-driven business decisions.
