€1.05 million funding round for Always Friday’s event AI

Always Friday, an Italian technology platform for organising corporate events, has announced that it has closed a €1.05 million pre-seed funding round led by Vento Ventures, P3 Ventures, Marco Migliore and Arnaldo Borghesi, alongside other business angels including several founders such as Pietro Picogna and Giacomo Gentili (through Mamba Ventures), Carlo Alberto Gaetaniello, Andrea Angrisani, Dario Del Gaizo, Pietro Rodolfi, Alexandros Fokianos, Alessandro Manzetti, Alan Qatipi, Emanuele Sanfelici, Gabriele Franco, Andrea Fussi and Marco Giuglietti.

The deal marks the company’s first round of investment and signals a new phase of growth for the start-up, which aims to digitise and automate a sector historically characterised by manual processes and a heavy operational workload.

Founded in Latina in 2024 by Gianluca Sordano, Antonio Restaino, Daniele Viccaro and Lorenzo Balzani, and now based in Milan, Always Friday has developed an AI-powered platform that automates the key workflows involved in organising corporate events: from finding venues and selecting suppliers to operational coordination, right through to the management of contracts, invoices and payments.

The start-up now has a team of nine people and, over the past year, has seen its turnover increase fivefold year-on-year. In the first quarter of this year, it has already matched the revenue for the whole of 2025, confirming the growing demand from businesses for technological tools capable of simplifying and speeding up the management of corporate events.

The corporate events market has traditionally been built around highly operational tasks: scouting venues, liaising and negotiating with suppliers, coordinating logistics and managing the various stages of organisation. These tasks are essential to the success of an event, but even today they require weeks of manual work and make the sector difficult to scale.

Always Friday tackles this complexity with a model that combines a technology platform with operational support. Artificial intelligence handles most of the processes, whilst the team focuses on coordination and client relations.

Using proprietary AI agents, the platform is able to handle tasks such as venue scouting, liaising with venues and suppliers, and negotiating availability and financial terms. Processes that traditionally require weeks of manual coordination can thus be completed in a matter of hours and on a much larger scale.

This approach enables the automation of up to 90% of operational tasks, allowing the team to handle a significantly greater number of incidents and customers than traditional models that rely solely on human labour.

This model is part of an emerging trend within the tech ecosystem: the rise of so-called AI-native agencies, where software and automation are transforming traditionally service-based businesses into scalable platforms. It is no coincidence that, in 2025, Y Combinator also included AI-native agencies among the most sought-after categories of start-ups in its annual list of investment opportunities.

To support the platform, Always Friday is building a proprietary database of venues, suppliers, prices and event performance metrics. This wealth of data enables the platform’s AI Agents to identify the most suitable solutions for each enquiry and allows them to operate with greater autonomy, drawing on a reliable database and structured commercial agreements with venues and suppliers.

The start-up’s aim is to build one of the largest proprietary databases of suppliers for corporate events in Italy and, subsequently, across Europe, by developing a competitive advantage based on both data and commercial relationships with venues and partners.

“We are building a platform that enables us to scale a sector where growth has historically been tied to manual labour,” says Gianluca Sordano, CEO and co-founder of Always Friday (pictured here with the other co-founders), in a statement. “Artificial intelligence allows us to automate much of the operational complexity, whilst maintaining quality and control over the end-user experience.”

The funds raised will be used to expand the technology team, with the aim of further enhancing the proprietary AI agents, strengthening the platform’s data infrastructure and supporting the model’s scalability.

The company will continue to focus in particular on the enterprise and mid-market segments, where the frequency of events and organisational complexity make operational efficiency a strategic factor.

The aim is to accelerate the development of the technology platform, strengthening its operational capabilities and scalability, in order to support sustainable growth in Italy and across key European markets.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ©

SUPPORT STARTUPBUSINESS

Was this article useful to you?

A small donation helps us keep producing independent content.

    Subscribe to the newsletter