Paradigma raises pre-seed as sole Italian pick in €125M European AI contest
What's the deal? ParadigmaDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a Rome-based startup automating scientific research with artificial intelligence, has raised a pre-seed round backed by Emergence Capital, Partech, Italian Founders FundDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, VentoDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and three notable individual investors. It is the only Italian company among the ten finalists of Germany's Next Frontier AI Challenge.
The investors: The round drew Michael BronsteinDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Alex BronsteinDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, both prominent machine-learning researchers, alongside Thomas WolfDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, co-founder of Hugging Face. Emergence Capital said Paradigma is its first pre-seed investment and its first outside the United States.
The founders: Paradigma was founded by Francesco PapponeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a former machine-learning doctoral candidate; Giulio StaraceDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, an ex-OpenAI researcher; and Emanuele Rodolà, a computer science professor at Rome's Sapienza University.
What's the endgame? Rather than build another language model, the startup wants to assist or automate the full research cycle, from forming hypotheses to experimental validation. Its first product, Flywheel, is a platform letting researchers and AI agents collaborate to accumulate knowledge and automate research tasks. Paradigma argues that automating parts of research could speed the development of new materials, drugs, energy technologies, and even new AI algorithms.
Why now? Selection into the Next Frontier AI Challenge, run by Germany's federal innovation agency SPRIND, gives the startup a shot at significant non-dilutive funding. The challenge runs in three stages and offers €125 million in total: the ten finalists each receive €3 million upfront; six advance to a further €8 million per project; and three finalists can each secure another €15.5 million — up to €26.5 million per company.
The signal: The contest's stated goal is to seed European companies that can compete with Silicon Valley's largest players and reach valuations above €1 billion. For Italy, Paradigma's inclusion is a rare presence in a race Europe is designing to close its AI gap.
Read more: Corriere della Sera
