Startup studio.
Serious innovation, in series.

A startup studio is a “generator of startups”, a company which builds new enterprises in series.
Startup Bakery is a startup studio specializing in cloud-based B2B software solutions with a strong Artificial Intelligence focus.

The advantages of the startup studio model

Compared to the “classic” startup creation, a startup studio approach aims at gaining two key advantages:

    • Lowering and mitigating a startup’s risk of failure
    • Enhancing the quality of the startups under development

Such advantages allow:

  • Investors to approach the startup world with a new type of investment and diversification strategy, going beyond the classic diversification tactics.
  • Enterprises to become industry partners of the studio, nurturing a hub of new startups. Those can be acquired at favourable conditions and be more easily integrated in a company’s technical and business processes.
  • Wannabe founders to build an enterprise in a “controlled environment”, learning on the job how to be a successful entrepreneur.
Startup studio vs accelerators and incubators
Startup studio process

Our business recipe

Just like the creation of an elaborate dish, the creation of a new enterprise in Startup Bakery requires the right amount of creativity and method.

We have created our own “business recipe”, a business model with a precise flow of activities and an extensive range of services.

How a startup studio works

How we approach innovation is what makes Startup Bakery different.

The startup studio model has been designed to overcome some typical limitations of the “traditional” startup creation, with the objective of creating “better startups” and increasing their chances of success.

The following elements make our startup studio model a winning one:

  • Experience – A startup studio is made of professionals with years of entrepreneurial experience, who can avoid the typical mistakes of a new founder and are able to implement the most relevant best practices. In the initial phases of the startup creation, the startup studio team acts as the founding team, steering the new startup towards a sound trajectory from the very beginning.
  • Methodology – In order to pursue a parallel entrepreneurship strategy, Startup Bakery applies the lean startup methodology, which allows to effectively develop multiple initiatives in incremental steps. In the case of a “traditional” and independent startup, the ability to choose and follow a precise method of work depends very much from the founders’ competence and experience.
  • Lack of bias – A “traditional founder” is typically “in love” with their own idea and is motivated in pursuing such idea at all cost. On the contrary, a startup studio only bets on ideas if there’s proof that they can succeed. If a business idea doesn’t pass the necessary validations, Startup Bakery’s best interest is to reinvent it, to “pivot”, or even to abandon it altogether and reallocate its resources and the entire working team on alternative and more promising business ideas.
  • Decision-making processes – The strength of a startup studio is made by the team of professionals and investors who back it. In Startup Bakery we have adopted holacracy as our management approach to make the most of the skills and experience of each team member, eliminating individual biases and basing each decision on objective data. This allows us to avoid the “subjectivity” and many of the typical mistakes of a traditional startup.
  • Resources – A startup studio is able to provide the new startup with its own financial and human capital right away, validating its business model even before its formal creation and accelerating its development from the outset. A traditional startup can hardly count on comparable resources and skillset before successfully closing at least the first financing round.

Absolutely not. Incubators and accelerators only select existing startups for their programs, to which they then provide consultancy services and working spaces. A startup studio, on the other hand, builds startups new from the ground up, injecting its own financial and human capital.

Since the “stemming” phase, the startup studio’s “resident team” is also the core team of the new startup that is being formed. All projects are followed by the same team of professionals, who are experienced in steering the development in the right direction from the start, applying well-tested tools and methodologies (which they already master proficiently), meaning that their learning curve is much shorter.

For this reason, a “pure” startup studio typically doesn’t sustain itself through the consultancy services offered to its startups, nor via the provision of work spaces. A startup studio only thrives if its own startups, which the studio has built from zero, also thrive.

Thanks to its agile and rigorous processes, and to an effective mix of human and financial capital, the startup studio model is the ideal solution to help enterprises meet their open innovation objectives.

Typically, an enterprise faces the following hurdles in order to try and innovate:

  • Competing priorities, as the current business, with its objectives and targets, inevitably takes over, leaving little room to innovation;
  • Lack of internal processes and tools to manage and coordinate any innovation effort;
  • Sourcing and retaining the right talent to develop and implement its innovation strategy;
  • The effort needed to Integrate new solutions, which have been independently developed outside the company.

Inevitably, these hurdles end up delaying the innovation agenda, leading to increased cost, loss of competitiveness and, above all, missed opportunities and loss of income.

Most open innovation programs are not well suited to overcome these hurdles because they focus almost exclusively on idea generation and on identifying existing companies, hoping that someone else may already have found the solution to a certain business pain.

The startup studio model overturns the innovation approach, starting not from an idea generation exercise but from a precise business pain, which gets analyzed and solved in line with the business expectations.

Startup Bakery agrees with the industry partner a milestone-based stemming process. At the end of the process, the industry partner will acquire and integrate the newly formed startup, which can immediately add value to the partner’s business because it was built for that purpose from the outset.

A key part of a startup studio strategy is to identify profitable business niches to focus on when creating new projects. To spot new opportunities, our startup studio uses a proprietary AI software which gathers and analyzes information from multiple sources, including both structured databases (for instance Crunchbase, Dealroom, Pitchbook…) and non-structured data (like industry news, social media, blogs, forums etc…).

The resulting analysis and consolidated data are leveraged by our business analysts who constantly monitor and study the innovation sector. Using AI, our analysts can produce detailed studies, providing our Investment Committee with a robust foundation on which to base every investment decision concerning the creation of new startups.

Who we work with

Startup Bakery was created to help founders, companies and professional investors to express their potential through the creation of innovative startups.

Founders
Co-founders

We offer co-founders the opportunity to develop a validated business idea, with access to capital, investors and a team of experts.

Corporates and SMEs
Enterprises

We help small-to-medium enterprises and corporates to lead innovation, rapidly building new business units and focusing on solutions that are scalable and easy to integrate.

Professional investors
Professional investors

We structure each and every startup as a unique investment opportunity, following a rigorous business validation method and building targeted partnerships.

  • Startup Studio

We build innovative startups

Startup Bakery, the Italian startup studio specializing in building B2B SaaS companies, leveraging Artificial Intelligence.