The shareholders’ meeting of Harmonic Innovation Group Società Benefit SpA (HIG) approves the 2026-2030 Business Plan and the extraordinary financing operation serving its execution.
The closing of the financing round has been signed which sees HIG attract capital for a total of €592 million between equity and convertible shareholder financing which will support the important acquisition and investment plan aimed at strengthening HIG’s tangible and intangible assets, consistent with its mission.
Harmonic Innovation Group Benefit Society – a project promoted by Entopan, an international think tank on the themes of development economics and innovation – consolidates the strategic perspective of establishing itself as a global game changer by promoting an Italian and Mediterranean way to building the future and sustainable development, also enhancing the cultural and strategic centrality of Southern Italy and the EUMENA and Global South areas.
The objective is to accelerate the development of the Harmonic Innovation Ecosystem, creating the main global collaborative platform (physical and digital) committed to the generation of innovation and research, new technologies and good practices, based on an ethical and humanistic vision, progressively increasing the widespread community of users, research centers, investment funds, industrial players, institutions and companies that share its principles and participate in it to support their own industrial and strategic growth.
Harmonic Innovation Ecosystem will be configured as an ecosystem integrator and platform of platforms, process & product driven with a focus on AI, with the aim of guiding the birth of a new cluster within the global innovation market – a market that today is worth around €10 trillion – dedicated to truly human-centered and ethics-based innovation. This perspective is made possible and is already in place as an effect of the distinctive positioning already consolidated thanks to the vision of Harmonic Innovation, defined and developed by the Founding President Francesco Cicione, and the global ecosystem that was born around them.
The operation sees as lead investor the Spanish Rubicon International, specialized in structured and alternative finance, which operates on behalf of and in collaboration with some of the main family offices and financial institutions in Euro-Asia and the Emirates, with a portfolio of liquid assets worth approximately €6.8 billion in the key areas of energy, healthcare, AI innovation and real estate. Rubicon is supported by IMCI+International through a newly established vehicle. Furthermore, the commitment of the main partners already present in the capital of HIG such as Santo Versace and his wife Francesca De Stefano, Antonio and Angelo Ferraro through 2EFFE Holding, as well as Entopan and Darwin is confirmed.
The structure envisages a capital increase of €30 million, of which €15 million will be subscribed by the Hispanic-Swiss Consortium and, for the remainder, by the aforementioned partners. The rest of the financial resources, worth €562.5 million, will instead be disbursed in tranches starting from June 2026 by Rubicon Finance Network and IMCI+ International as convertible shareholder financing at an initial valuation of more than one billion euros. For HIG, in structuring the operation up to the closing, alongside Entopan, Deloitte’s Valuation Modeling team, led by Francesco Iannamorelli, Equity Partner, acted as economic and financial advisor.
Pasqualino Scaramuzzino, president of Harmonic Innovation Group: “Today is not the finish line but it is a milestone in the path, done and to be done, to create the conditions aimed at creating a market for a specific type of innovation. It is the result of 25 years of work that Entopan, promoter of the project, has carried out with strong determination of the vision of the founder Francesco Cicione and of the unconditional support that he has found along the way from other entrepreneurs, innovators, financial institutions, universities, just to to name a few. We want to build an industrial policy from the bottom up with global ambitions, but rooted in Italy, in its South and in the Mediterranean and build a better future. We want to create an alternative to the quantitative vision of innovation that is currently dominant at a global level, maintaining the centrality of the human to which Pope Leo on the human being before profit. It is to this that we respond by proposing an alternative that arrives with perfect time to market, at a time when the number of people who feel the same need to innovate ethically, not to harness progress but on the contrary to guarantee it in the long term, is growing exponentially”.
Modesto N. Peña y Gorrin, founder and CEO of IMCI+ International comments: “Our investment and the operation as a whole will allow us to accelerate the execution of the plan and the development of the Harmonic Innovation Ecosystem. Thanks to this extraordinary physical and digital platform, with a focus on AI, we want to produce direct and systemic impacts on key sectors such as energy, biotechnology, circular economy and industrial digitalisation. When I met the founder Francesco Cicione for the first time at the beginning of 2024, I recognized as a visionary leader and in his project and team, harmonious innovation can become a transformative asset in which to inscribe and experiment with new development models. I am very happy to be able to help get such an unprecedented, courageous and necessary project off the ground.”
Ignacio Garcia, Founder and CEO of Rubicon International comments: “This operation represents a strong bet for Rubicon on the continent. For us it is a strategic move to help redefine the map of innovation in Europe, the Mediterranean and the world, with all the positive impacts that can derive from it. We share the urgency of putting the vision of Harmonic Innovation Group on the ground on a large scale to create a global innovation platform oriented towards sustainable development and active collaboration between the various public and private actors involved. We share a vision and values. To build common good. The alliance between the vision and ecosystem of the Harmonic Innovation Group and the network and investment tools of the Rubicon Consortium – IMCI+, will be disruptive and is destined to redefine the innovation models and the tools for access to capital also thanks to the Fintech platform that Rubicon has in an advanced stage of development”.
BUSINESS PLAN GUIDELINES:
“Harmonic Innovation Group, through its subsidiaries and activities, is today one of the most complete players operating in the sector, overseeing the entire innovation chain and dividing its activities into three macro areas: Innovation, Tech Factories, Real Estate.
Once the bootstrap phase has been completed, over the 2026-2030 plan horizon the Group will start the development phase by supporting a careful investment policy aimed at creating an open ecosystem, capable of generating value – financial, industrial, cultural – for the quality and variety of the biodiversity that composes it, attracting large players, investment funds, research and expertise centres, innovative startups and SMEs and young talents.
The approved Plan envisages investment and M&A operations on: highly technologically specialized tech factories, start-ups and scale-ups with a particular focus on the AI sector, boutique companies with high expertise in the foresight, tech transfer, advisory and VC sectors.
At the same time, the start-up phase of the Innovation and Research Labs will be launched together with the development of the digital platform. At the same time, the first part of the development of the heart of the physical platform will be completed, with the network of large Harmonic Innovation Hubs, the “places of the future”. In addition to the Harmonic Innovation Hub Pitagora, in Tiriolo (CZ) of 40,000m2 whose completion is imminent, work has started on the Harmonic Innovation Hub Archimede, in the industrial area of Catania, over 22,000m2, and the space for the Harmonic Innovation Hub in Lecce has already been identified. At the same time, the first five international spokes will be launched (probably in the USA, France, Spain, India and Africa) which will be added to the network of 12 small physical spokes (of the subsidiary Gate REI) on the national territory.
Naturally, to achieve all this, the launch of an important campaign to strengthen the team is also planned, which will double from the current approximately 400 people, net of acquisitions.
Thanks to the targeted investment strategy, the plan envisages tenfold the value of consolidated production to go from €50 million in 2025 to approximately €500 million by 2030. A growth that will also be reflected in the increase in the fair value of the investments, which from the current approximately €350 million is estimated to rise to €1 billion, to which will be added the value of the real estate assets which is estimated to reach approximately €200 million.
The heart of Harmonic Innovation Group’s integrated offering will be membership of the collaborative Ecosystem Platform, through diversified methods including Innovation and Research Labs. At the same time, the various vehicles of the group will continue their market activities in the three different verticals (Innovation, Tech Factories and Real Estate Innovation).
Emanuele Spampinato, CEO of Harmonic Innovation Group, concludes: “We have already concretely seen how participation in our ecosystem promotes growth for everyone. The dialogue and collaborations initiated with the OECD, the World Bank, the Italian Government and foreign embassies, as well as with the main global innovation ecosystems, are testimony to this. The collaboration between the members of the ecosystem promoted through the physical and digital platform is functional to creating widespread value through the generation of qualified dealflow, the development of strategic and industrial collaborative relationships stable among stakeholders, support for the venture building of investment targets and the implementation of related activities for growth and the creation of impacts in line with the sustainable development objectives”.