Our friend Paolo Merialdo, professor at the Engineering Department of the Roma 3 University, is the co-founder of InnovAction Lab, a program for college students who are interested in becoming entrepreneurs: in 4 years more than 800 students have been part of this program and more than 40 startups have been founded thanks of it. InnovAction Lab has evolved and is now an incubator: “Dock3 – the Startup Lab”.

Paolo almost every year brings some of his students to New York to learn about our startup community. 

It’s great to know that one of the startups that were incubated by Dock3 was recently acquired by Apple. The startup is Stamplay and its focus – according to the co-founder Giuliano Iacobelli – is “Lego for APIs,” enabling a business’ developers to more simply connect both internal and external APIs to apps — effectively, enabling one app to offer features supplied by different developers. 

Stamplay won Visa’s Everywhere Initiative API contest in 2016, and it was entrusted with an unspecified development project for the payments giant. Its experience in the financial payments industry may be the reason why Apple bought it (paying 5 million euros, according to rumors) , because digital payments are part of the services that are getting more and more important for Apple.

We wish all the best to Giuliano, who is in San Francisco: maybe he has already met the most important Italian working in Cupertino, Apple CFO Luca Maestri, and he has asked him some good advice…