About this Event
Dear Friends,
We are delighted to invite you to an evening conversation with Luca Foresti, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Niulinx, the Politecnico di Milano spin-off building Europe's first Level 4 autonomous driving platform designed from the ground up around European regulation.
Few technologies promise to reshape daily life as deeply as autonomous driving: it brings together artificial intelligence, sensing and perception, vehicle engineering, safety certification, urban planning and public policy, in a race currently dominated by heavily capitalised American and Chinese players. Luca has set out to prove that Europe can build its own champion in this field. Niulinx develops the full technology stack for self-driving vehicles, from perception and path planning to vehicle control and remote fleet management, with a team of more than sixty data scientists and engineers.
Born from the AIDA research group of Politecnico di Milano, Niulinx raised €38 million in April 2026, with A2A Life Ventures and CDP Venture Capital among its backers. In June 2026 it began testing on public roads in Cernusco sul Naviglio and Brescia, and in September 2026 it signed a long-term memorandum of understanding with the Municipality of Milan on bringing autonomous driving into urban mobility.
Luca's own path is a rare one. A physicist by training, he graduated from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he also pursued the PhD programme in Financial Mathematics. He began his career in microfinance banking in developing countries, then helped set up a payment-processing data centre in Frankfurt and in 2005 founded the ICT startup Econoetica. From 2010 to 2024 he was CEO of Centro Medico Santagostino, growing it from a single clinic into a network of over thirty medical centres serving millions of patients, and leading it through its acquisition by UnipolSai in 2022. In 2024 he founded the startup studio First Principles, through which he invests in early-stage deeptech companies, before launching Niulinx in 2025.
This conversation will offer the Wharton, Stanford and HBS communities a distinctive opportunity to discuss how we will move in the decade ahead: how Europe secures technological sovereignty in artificial intelligence, how a startup competes against far larger global players, how cities will redesign transport around shared autonomous fleets, and how regulators and the public can come to trust a vehicle with no one at the wheel. It will also be a chance to explore what it takes to move from one industry to a completely different one, and to build a deeptech company at European scale.
We would like to warmly thank Arca Fondi SGR, sponsor and host of this event .
Event Details
Wednesday, November 11th
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Arca Fondi SGR: Via Disciplini 3, 20123 Milan
Event venue & nearby stays
Arca Fondi SGR, Via Disciplini 3, Milano, Italy
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