The economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic is starting to make itself felt and the estimates on the trend for 2020 are increasingly heavy. According to the parliamentary budget office, Italian GDP will contract by 15% in the first half of the year, a percentage never seen in the history of the Republic. Yet in this gloomy scenario there are realities that continue to invest and sectors that are also accelerating due to the effect of Covid-19.
Among these there is Charioteer, company active in the market of software solutions for omnichannel banking, which announced the acquisition of Lookwise Device Manager, a modular cybersecurity platform and business unit of S21Sec, a European company specializing in security services.
As expected, Auriga will integrate Lockwise technology acquiring both the customer portfolio and a proprietary platform capable of providing the most advanced and effective countermeasures to defend against IT threats, malware and hacker attacks. Auriga and S21Sec will collaborate to offer expanded cybersecurity advice to customers.
“By integrating LDM with the WWS suite, Auriga offers its customers the ability to manage the security of devices (such as ATMs, POS terminals, critical infrastructure control systems) centrally by protecting, monitoring and controlling assets. Through a system of this type it is possible to carry out investigations and react proactively to potential incidents or fraudulent actions. All with the minimum use of resources and time”, explains the company in a note.
“By making LDM an integral part of our product portfolio we will be able to significantly develop the most effective cyber risk management and prevention capabilities for our customers, who in turn will be able to protect the digital financial services offered across all channels,” explains Vincenzo Fiore, CEO of Auriga.
Moving from cybersecurity to medicine, Sofinnova Partners, a European life sciences venture capital firm with offices in Paris, London and Milan, has announced an investment in Genespire, a company specializing in the development of advanced therapies for patients with genetic diseases founded by Professor Luigi Naldini, director of the San Raffaele-Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy (SR-Tiget).
In detail, this operation is the third carried out in Italy in the last six months by the Sofinnova Telethon Fund, an Italian fund entirely dedicated to biotechnology managed by Sofinnova Partners, for a total of 25 million euros. The fund had previously invested in Epsilen Bio, which is developing a technology to shut down the expression of genes related to specific diseases without irreversibly modifying DNA, and in Pincell, a pre-clinical stage biotech company focused on new therapies for rare dermatological diseases.
“These investments are the result of the excellent collaboration between Sofinnova Partners and Telethon Foundation which made it possible to identify exceptional startups, confirming our belief in Italy's great growth potential in the biotechnology sector” declared Graziano Seghezzi, managing partner of Sofinnova Partners.
