Italian holding company · since 2024
DaVinci Capitals S.r.l. is the Italian holding company of the WPI group. It owns and funds long-term stakes in operating companies, and manages a portfolio of listed European securities with its own capital. The name is not decoration: what we take from Leonardo is the habit of imagining what does not exist yet, of working across disciplines instead of inside one, and of looking at things directly rather than trusting what everybody already believes.
A holding company is judged by what it owns, not by what it says. These are the three places where our own capital sits.
Our largest holding is 35.55% of Cognitive AI, the Italian company that plans and runs digital advertising on its own cookieless identification technology. The group founded it in 2019 and sold the majority to PM & Partners in 2024. We reinvested at that closing instead of cashing out, and we kept a seat on the board.
We invest part of our own capital in listed European companies we can read from their accounts rather than from a story. We work on the portfolio with our own tools: T.I.N.O. (Treasury Intelligence & Neural Orchestration), the version we customised of StockPickers.app, which puts artificial intelligence and quantitative models to work on equity analysis.
We invest alongside other investors in club deals and private equity transactions in European companies, among them Twinset, the Italian fashion brand. Minority positions, on the same terms as everyone else at the table, in businesses we can understand from the inside.
Quando camminerete sulla terra dopo aver volato, guarderete il cielo perché là siete stati e là vorrete tornare.Leonardo da Vinci
Not an investment we found on a list. A company the group started, funded and ran, and did not leave when the money arrived.
In 2019 the founders of the group started Cognitive on a bet that few shared at the time: that the third-party cookie was finished, and that whoever owned a persistent identifier of their own would own the next cycle of digital advertising.
In 2024 PM & Partners, an Italian private equity firm, acquired the majority. DaVinci Capitals S.r.l., incorporated in Milan on 18 June 2024, bought 35.55% at the December closing. Paolo Pettinato stayed on as chief executive officer of the company and sits on its board on behalf of DaVinci Capitals.
