We are in the Bergamo Sviluppo incubator
Mastranet AI is officially part of the Bergamo Sviluppo Business Incubator - the special agency of the Bergamo Chamber of Commerce - based at the Point in Dalmine.
For a software house working on document automation for manufacturing companies, sitting inside a technology hub surrounded by local industry is not a cosmetic choice: it is where the problems we solve can be seen up close.
What the Point in Dalmine is
The Point (Polo per l'Innovazione Tecnologica) was founded in 2001 in what used to be an industrial area of Dalmine. What sets it apart from other Italian incubators is that it keeps established companies and startups in the same place: some 2,500 square metres dedicated to around twenty companies in incubation, alongside firms that are already well established.
The facility is run by Bergamo Sviluppo, directed by Cristiano Arrigoni and chaired by Giacinto Giambellini. It also houses open laboratories: one built with the mechatronics consortium Intellimech, one for lean office transformation, and an experience centre with a mini-factory equipped to simulate the operations of a manufacturing business.
Not every company can get in: admission goes through a public call, and the selection criterion is how innovative the project is.
What the incubator offers startups
The package available to companies that are admitted includes:
- Space at subsidised rent, for a stay of up to three years.
- 25 hours of consultancy a year on business matters, plus training hours.
- Assessment of the product's patentability, which for anyone building technology is anything but a detail.
- Access to the labs and the hub's activities, from seminars to meetings with international delegations.
On top of that comes the work of Bergamo Sviluppo's Digital Enterprise Point: in 2024 it ran 20 webinars, seminars and hands-on courses involving 815 people in total, plus 427 users who took part in assessment activities to evaluate their own digital maturity.
Why being there matters to us
The practical reason is proximity. TypeLens grew by working on the real documents of fifteen companies in the Bergamo area: delivery notes, orders and invoices with the real layouts of real suppliers, not sample files. Being inside an industrial ecosystem shortens the distance between "we have an idea" and "we tried it on a real case" - the only test that counts when you build document automation.
The second reason is technical exchange. A hub hosting mechatronics, manufacturing and software puts the people who have the problem and the people who have the tools in the same room: that is how our computer vision projects for quality control started.
The article in L'Eco di Bergamo
L'Eco di Bergamo ran a feature on the Point ecosystem - "In the 'Point world', Bergamo start-ups are writing the future", by Astrid Serughetti - covering the companies incubated in Dalmine, ours among them. It is reproduced below.
