Francesco Marini Clarelli

Francesco Marini Clarelli actively invested in startups as an Angel Investor all along his career and he is currently the President and Co-founder of Italian Angels for Growth, the largest angel group in the country. His first angel investment was made in 1987, when he was 30, in a media start-up that few years later it was sold to the main Italian publishing group after a growth from €1 million to €15 million in sales. His latest successful exit has been Yoox.com, a global fashion products e-commerce company, that he invested in as a start-up in 2000. The company later became the leading global player and successfully listed on the Milan stock exchange in 2009. Francesco has so far invested in more than 20 startups during his professional career. Always an active investor both in the private equity as well as listed securities fields, he presently owns and runs Astor Investment Advisors SIM, a thematic asset allocation advisory concern. He sits on the Advisory Board of Value Secondary Investments, an Luxembourg based secondary private equity investment fund, and is also a member of the board of a number of industrial concerns. In 2001 he founded, with other partners, one of the first funds of hedge funds management companies in Italy. Francesco obtained a BA with honors in 1980 majoring in Economics at the University of California in Santa Barbara, and started his career at Bank of America’s New York branch. Francesco was awarded "Angel of the Year 2011" by EBAN (European Business Angel Network), the pan-European federation of early stage investors.