Building A Business From Bergamo, The Italian Epicenter Of COVID-19

While the coronavirus pandemic has been disastrous for businesses across the board, many online companies are experiencing unprecedented demand. Their founders might say they were in the right place at the right time. But not Frank Furnari. While the CEO and founder of virtual reality presentations platform VRtuoso had a huge surge in demand for business, he was trapped in Bergamo, Italy, one of the worst affected cities in Europe, when the pandemic and the lockdown began.

“It was surreal, like watching a Hollywood horror movie,” he says. “Yet, somehow we had to adapt our business operations and management to pandemic conditions very quickly.”

VRtuoso delivers education and training to major global organizations, including American Express, British Telecom, PwC, Pfizer, Leonardo Military Defence, BP, Barilla, CGI, Belfast Harbour, and Telecom Italia. As lockdowns were imposed around the world, demand for platforms that could facilitate remote training for staff surged.

It is the third company that Furnari has founded, and he admits that it is largely a result of the steep learning curve that followed his unsuccessful first startup.

“I was 22 when I founded my first company, raising $10 million from Softbank Ventures,” he says. “I made every mistake you could think of, and it was a complete disaster, however, it also served as the best MBA or business gym that you could imagine.”

It was in 1995, while he was in high school, that he had watched the first Hollywood movie based on VR, The Lawnmower Man. He says: “That movie changed my life and I convinced my parents to fund my ‘parallel’ studies on VR, which is where my journey into VR began.”

What had started as a hobby developed into a professional service with his second startup. “We were providing key innovation services to global corporate clients, and within these services were VR and AR solutions,” he says. “Over the course of a decade, I recorded all the key issues and challenges that businesses had with VR, writing up pages of business and technical requirements.”

Four years ago, Furnari, and his business partner and VRtuoso’s CTO Marco Moncalvo, decided to create a product that would meet everything documented within those pages of requirements.

They invested their own money, and after two years of R&D and collaboration with several universities and corporate laboratories, they had the first version of VRtuoso. In the process they had developed some new approaches to VR live content creation and real-time guided content consumption, resulting in an initial 16 patents applications.

“We didn’t want to raise any external funding until we had proved significant market traction and validated the business proposition,” says Furnari. “However, we did have significant help from the two accelerator programs that I’d participated in; the Virgin StepUp Accelerator and the TechItalia Accelerator in London, and the tremendous work of a veteran pool of international business and technical advisors.”

VRtuoso was launched in 2018 and since then has been used by more than 30 global companies and over one million immersive VR learning users. To date, it has delivered over 500,000 hours of virtual training. Then in February, COVID-19 arrived in Italy, bringing death and devastation on an unprecedented scale to its northern regions, including Bergamo. Alongside the unfolding crisis came a rise in global demand for remote training, education, and collaboration solutions in the commercial sector.

Furnari says: “We were coping with a sudden increase in business demand, with everyone on the team under strict stay-at-home orders, so we had to transform the business operations and management to what was happening around us at the speed of light.”

A lot of his time was spent offering support and trying to boost the morale of his team of 15, who were all struggling with the horrors of living through a real pandemic. He says: “It was a surreal situation, but I believe that being so busy with our work stopped us thinking too much about the pandemic and how it was affecting us all. It helped us to optimize the business as it forced us to respond to things in a very different way.”

VRtuoso recently secured a follow-on seed funding from its existing investors, UK-based Symvan Capital and Italy-based Compagnia Bresciana Investimenti S.p.A., bringing the total seed funding to over $1 million.

Furnari says: “It is hard to truly predict business forecasts during the COVID-19 period, but based on our recent engagements, we expect to grow significantly in the next 12 months and our revenue is heading toward a run rate of $1m ARR.

“There are several industries that will take a long time to recover from the pandemic, however, I sense in people an eagerness to embrace the ‘new normality’ with a lot more energy and desire to make things happen. I believe all human beings have already learned lessons from this crisis.”