Young Platform, a startup offering a platform for buying and selling cryptocurrencies, was born at I3P, the incubator of Politecnico di Torino, and its co-founders are six young guys in their early 20s led by Andrea Ferrero. In 2018, the initial capital consisted of €50,000, today its valuation has reached €18.5 million. Young currently serves 50,000 customers and brokers trading a volume of €5 million in Bitcoin every week.
In this company there has just been a Series A round by United Ventures SGRan Italian fund for the development of innovative companies in the digital field, in which partner Massimiliano Magrini has invested € 3.5 mln bringing his share to 18%. . This investment was joined by a group of shareholders consisting of Luca Ascani, Max Ciociola, Pietro Invernizzi and Luigi Berlusconi's Ithaca Investments, which took over the shares of the angel investors who in recent years have believed in the project and supported it.
Andrea Ferrero said: "We were fascinated by the anarchic aspect of Bitcoin. So I founded Young with my friends Alexandru Stefan Gheban, Samuele Raimondo, Andrea Carollo, Marco Ciarmoli and Daniele Rinaldi. I3P gave us a hand in the form of services, spaces at very low costs and a network of professionals experienced in working with startups. Their first advice was to open an office in Tallinn, Estonia, to get a license to operate. We wanted to become institutionalized."
Young's goal is to scale up to become the first Bitcoin buying and selling platform in Italy, aiming to reach 250,000 customers. Operationally, it also plays a counterparty role for its customers, which is why most of the liquidity held is currently made up of cryptocurrencies. There are currently over 100 mln cryptocurrency holders in the world and this branch of fintech is experiencing an extremely prosperous moment: in April the crypto exchange platform Coinbase was listed on the New York Stock Exchange achieving a record valuation of 85 billion dollars.
Young Platform's success lies in its ability to simplify access to the world of cryptocurrenciesthanks to a suite of digital products capable of serving very different users, from beginners to experts, and also in the activity carried out in the field of education and dissemination on the functioning of the enabling technologies for the cryptocurrency market,such as the blockchain.
