Domenico Nesci

Domenico Nesci is a Rome-based deep-tech venture investor who founded and leads Deep Ocean Capital SGR (established 2021), the independent management company behind the Deep Blue Ventures fund. He holds a degree in Electronic Engineering from La Sapienza University in Rome and an MBA from LUISS Business School, and is a Kauffman Fellow (Class KF 19), having completed his fellowship at LVenture Group under mentor Luigi Capello.

His career began in industry rather than finance. Nesci spent roughly 15 years in telecommunications — primarily the mobile business — rising to VP-level management and running his own company, which he exited in 2000. He then spent about 10 years as an entrepreneur in Customer Management and Customer Operations Outsourcing (BPO); his older contact addresses (Call & Call / CalleCall and Mobile Cohesion, where he was a principal) date from this period.

Nesci moved into investing through Italian Angels for Growth (IAG), Italy's largest angel network, where he spent several years as a member and was lead investor in the U.S. startup ProxToMe. In 2015 he co-founded Angel Partner Group, one of the first large business-angel communities in Rome. He also served as a Partner at LVenture Group (a seed VC) and Advisor to the LUISS ENLABS accelerator, bridging angel and institutional venture capital.

Beyond his fund, Nesci has held a range of ecosystem roles: jury member for the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator, Contract Professor of Venture Capital at LUMSA, Venture Partner at Smartup Capital, and founder/president of CambiaMenti, a nonprofit focused on youth entrepreneurship education. His stated conviction is that Italian and European scientific research can be translated into globally competitive industrial companies.

• Invests through Deep Blue Ventures, "an early-stage deep tech venture capital fund," backing "outstanding deep technologies, and people able to harnessing them to great global success."
• Core sectors: aerospace/space, healthcare tech, and sustainability, with AI, quantum computing, photonics, cyber, and the "future of computing" as recurring cross-cutting themes.
• Strong preference for university and research-center spin-offs (Scuola Normale Superiore, CNR, IIT, Politecnico/I3P ecosystem) — a model that "bridges scientific research and industrial application."
• Stage: seed through selected Series A, backing companies "from the stage where companies check their product-market fit until… a solid foundation to start scaling up."
• Thesis in his own words: *"We firmly believe that after a 10-year wave of innovation, there will be another one that will be more deeply focused on disruptive technologies."*
• Says yes to radical/disruptive technology tied to a real industrial need in a fast-growing market — e.g., on AI4IV: *"a compelling example of radical innovation applied to a real industrial need, in a field – computer vision – set for exponential growth in the coming years."*