LIFTT, a venture capital holding company with a strong focus on impact on the Italian territory, announces two new investments promoting the development of Italian photonics, one of the six technologies deemed strategic by the European Commission for industrial innovation, welfare, citizen safety and sustainable development.

With €750,000, LIFTT enters as the sole investor in Subphoton, a startup that has developed the application of photonics to the undersea telecommunications cabling sector. This initial investment will be followed by Venture Capital's subsequent cash injection in late 2023 to set up the manufacturing facility in Milan. Subphoton's core business focuses on the physical infrastructure on which the Internet world rests, much of it submerged in the oceans: 1.3 million kilometers of cables, equal to 32 times the circumference of the Earth, through which 99 percent of global digital communications and transactions travel and which requires constantly improving performance.

For LIFTT, Subphoton is a strategic investment because it represents a "unicum" both because the technology they have developed is superior to any standard currently available and because of their ability to intercept the needs of a market in which investments of several billion euros have already been planned over the next few years: for example, at least 100,000 kilometers of new cables are laid each year, with routes and logics that are also very different from the original ones that date back to the second half of the last century.

LIFTT is also investing €250,000 in CareGlanceCareGlance, a deeptech startup that has conceived and patented an innovative proposal for OCT (Optical Coherence Tomography), a field characterized by a high potential of applications, from ophthalmology to Industry 4.0, for a market currently worth $1.2 billion with growth forecasts of 9.8 percent. New generation OCTs, with high-resolution three-dimensional images and a wider field of view, have recently been launched in the market: CareGlance has developed a new ultrafast and compact technology called Swept Source (tunable source) that will enable a portable, reliable, real-time OCT device to be manufactured and marketed by the end of next year. CareGlance technology also enables a 50 percent reduction in the current industrial cost of the laser, making it easier to implement on a large scale.

For LIFTT, CareGlance has a number of advantages that make it extremely competitive: un prodotto estremamente versatile, innovativo e migliorativo sotto tutti i punti di vista, capace di abbattere i costi in un mercato a high growth trend. LIFTT's investment will complete the development and validation of the technology in ophthalmology, while applications of the technology in industry are being funded and will be carried out in parallel. First sales of the new device are expected in 2023.

Giovanni Tesoriere, CEO of LIFTT, said, "Investing in photonics technology and supporting the growth of Italian startups that develop its applications means investing directly in the future of our country: Italy, both as research and industry, has a prominent international position together with Germany, the United Kingdom and France. Our commitment-as the first Italian Venture Capital with a photonics-driven portfolio-is precisely to give a concrete perspective to these innovations that will change our future for the better."

Subphoton's Daniele Androni commented, "We are very happy to have found in LIFTT a partner who not only believes in the development of Subphoton's solutions but with whom we share our idea of the future and the enthusiasm to propose concrete solutions to the challenges that will be posed to the next generations."

Maria Chiara Ubaldi, CEO of CareGlance, commented, "CareGlance is pleased to announce the entry into the corporate structure of the venture capital LIFTT, one of the few in Italy with the mission of betting on Italian deep tech companies. Supporting hardware-focused startups is relatively new in our country, and is a great incentive for a revival of Italy's role in the international advanced technology landscape." 

(Source: LIFTT press release)