Antonio Assereto

Antonio Assereto is the founder and managing partner of Proximity Capital, a Milan-based investment holding he established in 2014 to make angel and early-stage investments in Italian startups. He trained as an engineer at Politecnico di Milano before moving into strategy and finance. He began his career as a strategy consultant at Bain & Company, then served as Investment Director at Jupiter Finance, the non-performing-loan (NPL) fund of the CIR Group (the De Benedetti family holding), where he managed over €150 million invested in NPL portfolios acquired from major Italian banks.

He launched Proximity Capital as a "high conviction, high concentration" vehicle built around the philosophy that "not every company needs VC money." Rather than deploying a traditional broad fund, Assereto makes only a handful of seed investments per year and commits to backing companies through follow-on Series A rounds. Over roughly a decade, the group has invested on the order of €60 million across about 24–25 startups, with a portfolio that has produced two unicorns, an IPO, and multiple acquisitions.

Around the core holding, Assereto has built out related vehicles: FocusFuturo, an advisory-and-investment platform focused on seed-stage startups, and Mercurio Holding, a vehicle specialized in scale-up investments (which holds the group's positions in later-stage companies such as Satispay and Grover). His best-known early bet was Satispay: he backed the fintech in 2014 in its first round open to outside investors — when it was valued at roughly €15 million — with an initial ticket of around €500K, and reinvested in every subsequent capital increase through 2022, when Satispay reached unicorn status. Across those rounds Proximity is reported to have committed roughly €22 million to Satispay.

• Stage: Pre-seed and seed, with a stated commitment to follow on at Series A after leading or joining a seed round.
• Cadence & style: "We make only a few seed investments per year" — a deliberately concentrated, high-conviction approach; prefers to lead rounds.
• Check size: Up to ~€500K at pre-seed and up to ~€2M at seed.
• Sectors: B2B software broadly, with demonstrated concentration in payments, insurtech, banking/fintech, HR, food tech, e-commerce, and fashion.
• Geography: Primarily Italy, with select international exposure.
• What makes him say yes: Exceptional founding teams and durable ambition. Reflecting on Satispay, Assereto has said he has "never again met a team like that" ("Non ho mai più incontrato un team del genere"), underscoring that team quality — not just market or product — is the decisive factor.
• Philosophy: "High conviction, high concentration" and "not every company needs VC money" — signaling selectivity and a preference for backing few companies deeply rather than spraying capital.