In Lapis’s case, building a Knowledge Bank could be applied to any industry. Institutional knowledge drains are everywhere in businesses and Lapis’s knowledge infrastructure solves this succinctly by crawling databases, selecting the right information, and highlighting what’s important to those who need it. But finding a sector where the problem is most acute, and where organisations are ready to adopt a solution, is what determines whether a technology becomes viable in-market.

This is the story of Lapis, backed by Founders Factory and Mediobanca through our MBSpeedUp Accelerator, reimagining how knowledge is stored, retrieved, and applied inside financial institutions - and how its founders deliberately narrowed their focus to a precise, high-value product for investment professionals.

The Mediobanca relationship became the catalyst for that shift. More than just a source of capital, it gave Lapis access to real users, real data, and real workflows inside a complex financial institution. This partnership allowed the founders to test and refine their product in an environment where information retrieval isn’t just a technical challenge but core to how deals are made, portfolios are managed, and ultimately how institutional memory is preserved.

From AI research to knowledge infrastructure

Lapis is a deep-tech company with an academic background. The startup was founded by Pietro, a medical doctor and anesthetist and Davide, a machine learning researcher; and was the brainchild of research collaborations with the AI Institute at the University of Birmingham, King’s College London, and UCL. 

Initially, they explored opportunities in healthcare where vast amounts of data are stored, but they quickly encountered slow procurement cycles, fragmented IT systems, and regulatory barriers that made early commercial traction challenging.

Rather than forcing a fit or creating horizontal enterprise software, the team paused and asked: where is this problem sharper, and who is ready to solve it now? 

Only after working with finance advisor Matteo and eventually Mediobanca, did they realise the opportunity in large-scale banks.

Testing and scaling inside real institutions

The Mediobanca partnership gave Lapis more than funding: it gave them a live environment to test and refine their product.

They began with a single team, tackling specific portfolio management workflows inside a mid-sized bank. As results spread internally, other teams adopted the platform. This bottom-up expansion, starting with one team, demonstrating clear value, then scaling department by department, became central to Lapis’s go-to-market strategy.

This strategy echoes a pattern seen in some of the most successful B2B SaaS companies: embed deeply, solve a real pain point, then scale horizontally within the organisation.