At INNOVIT, the Strongest Pitches in the Room Belonged to Women
There is a particular energy in a room where founders have to stand up, make their case, and be judged in real time. At INNOVIT, that energy is very much by design.
NextStar Venture Partners Managing Director Deborah Magid recently had the pleasure of serving as a shark judge at INNOVIT’s biotech startup pitch session in San Francisco, where thirteen scale-up founders from the Italian biotech ecosystem brought their companies to the floor and made their pitches to a panel of investors and industry leaders. Each judge was given a pool of 50 Million Innovit Dollars to distribute among their favorites. The currency is symbolic. The signal it sends is not.
What INNOVIT Is and Why It Matters
INNOVIT is the premier Italian Innovation and Culture Hub, promoted by Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and coordinated by the Consulate General of Italy in San Francisco and the Embassy of Italy in Washington DC. Located in the heart of San Francisco at 710 Sansome Street, it serves as a bridge between the Italian innovation ecosystem and the venture capital, technology, and research networks of Silicon Valley. In its first three years of activity, INNOVIT accelerated almost 400 startups and SMEs, selected from more than 1,000 applicants, and brought around 680 entrepreneurs to San Francisco. The numbers reflect a program that has earned its reputation through consistent delivery, not marketing.
The pitch format is intentionally rigorous. Founders do not simply present. They compete, in front of people who have seen enough pitches to know within minutes whether the science is credible, the market is real, and the team has what it takes.
The Standouts: Two Founders Who Earned Every Dollar
Across thirteen pitches, two companies rose to the top and between them claimed 21 of the 50 million Innovit Dollars on offer. Both were led by women.
Elena Paola Lanati is the Founder and CEO of Lionhealth Italia, a health tech startup established in 2022 and dedicated to clinical nutrition, developing Foods for Medical Purposes with a focus on disease-related malnutrition. Elena is also Vice President at IAB, Italian Angels for Biotech, and has been recognized among Forbes Italy’s 100 managers of the year and among StartupItalia’s 100 innovators of 2024. Her pitch reflected both the depth of her clinical thinking and the clarity of a founder who understands exactly what she is building and why it matters.
Maddalena Pacelli is the founder of Tiber Biotech Srl, a Rome-based biotech startup developing highly selective monoclonal antibodies designed for individual patients, grounded in bioinformatics and personalized immunotherapy research. Tiber’s work sits at the frontier of what precision oncology looks like when the science is genuinely built around the patient rather than around an average. Maddalena’s background spans structural biology and bioinformatics, with training at the Sapienza Università di Roma and the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Watching both of them present was a reminder of what the biotech investment conversation too often undervalues.
A Gap That Numbers Still Cannot Explain
According to PitchBook’s 2025 US All In: Female Founders in the VC Ecosystem report, published in March 2026, biotech and pharma was one of the only sectors outside of AI where female founders saw measured growth in both investment value and deal count last year. That is meaningful progress. It is also still progress measured against a low baseline, in an industry where female-only founding teams continue to receive a disproportionately small share of available capital despite consistently strong performance metrics.
The INNOVIT pitch session offered a small but vivid counter-argument to that structural reality. The two founders who commanded the most attention and the most Innovit Dollars in a room of thirteen were women bringing genuine scientific depth, clinical credibility, and commercial clarity to the floor. That does not close the funding gap. But it is the kind of moment that quietly shapes how investors think, and those moments compound over time.
The Life Sciences and BioTech Showcase
The following day brought a larger public gathering: the Life Sciences and BioTech Showcase, where 25 companies spanning both early-stage acceleration programs and more mature scale-up ventures took the stage. The scale of the program, across both days, spoke to the breadth and ambition of the Italian biotech pipeline that INNOVIT is actively working to connect with the resources of Silicon Valley.
Why NextStar Was in the Room
Health is one of NextStar’s core investment sectors, and the Italian biotech ecosystem is producing founders whose scientific foundations are serious and whose ambitions are global. Events like these matter to us not as spectators but as participants in a conversation about which companies are worth believing in early, and why. The founders Deborah saw at INNOVIT this week are already on their way. The job of the investment community is to make sure the capital and the connections catch up to the quality of the science.
