Alberto Aurighi · 21 · Vittorio Veneto, Italy
I’m 21 and I’m building my startup.
I do it because I love it, genuinely. When I work on something I care about, something switches on in my head and I can’t think about anything else. For a while I believed I wanted it for the money, or to become someone, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Then, working on it, I understood that what I’m really after is exactly that feeling: building something of my own.
Student at H-Farm · founder of Mergerly
Alberto · live
00
Who I am
Let me tell you who I am, before the numbers. Scroll sideways, I’ll be quick.
01
Where the dream started
I grew up in Vittorio Veneto. As a kid I wasn’t the one locked in his room coding: I devoured the biographies of the founders I admired, people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, and watched films like The Social Network. That’s what I wanted to do, build something of my own.
02
Where I study, and next
I chose H-Farm College because it’s the only place in Italy where students are pushed to start being founders before they even finish their bachelor’s. Finance grew on me along the way. And I’ve just been admitted to the master’s at Nova SBE in Lisbon.
03
Why I build
I build because few things are as fun to me. For a while I thought I wanted it for the money, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But what I’m really after is the feeling of making something of my own, something I believe in. It’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t felt it.
04
What matters to me
Outside work, what matters most is my family and my friends, some of whom I pulled in as co-founders. I try to stay empathetic even at work. I’m no genius: I keep going because I don’t give up.
05
Where I want to get
In ten years I picture myself in San Francisco, with one or more companies actually built, sharp people around me, and my family close. I want to build things that matter.
Mergerly was born almost by accident, out of a boring job.
Three steps, one after another. Follow the thread.
I started as a regular analyst in the M&A team. When they saw I was good with AI, they asked me to try automating their deal origination, the biggest bottleneck in their work. I put together a still-rough automation, they liked it a lot, and that’s when I understood something: there was real market interest.
In September I went back for my third year and applied to the Startup Center’s pre-accelerator program with the Mergerly idea. They took me in. For five months I worked alongside managers and professionals who accelerated the idea into something real, no longer just a prototype.
Today Mergerly is an AI layer for M&A: it analyses, scores and compares companies, builds longlists and runs deal pipelines, the work that takes an analyst days. I built it vibe coding with Claude Code: I don’t write code by hand, I describe what I want and check it line by line.
All mandate and client data is anonymised.
An experiment, again in vibe coding. I built an agentic system and gave it one instruction: trade US stocks for a month, on its own.
It adopted the “picks and shovels” thesis (during the gold rush, the ones selling picks and shovels made more than the prospectors) and applied it to today’s AI: not the models, but the makers of semiconductors and memory, now in real shortage. It opened and closed positions by itself. After a month I closed at +23.78%.
The heart of the thesis is MU, SNDK, WDC, AMD: memory and semiconductors, the positions to hold. ASML trimmed, gold and silver exiting to concentrate everything on semiconductors and equipment.
A personal experiment with a symbolic amount. Not financial advice.
Something I’m proud of: the whole Mergerly team wrote their bachelor’s thesis on the startup. We’re a group of friends of more than ten years, now co-founders, and each of us tackled a different research question, framed around our role in the company: one on product, one on the market, one on finance, me on automation.
My part investigates how AI can automate deal origination, the slowest phase of M&A. I brought together research on the Italian market, three rounds of interviews and demos with real firms, and the numbers from the five-year model. The conclusion, validated in the field and not just in theory: a platform like Mergerly really can replace part of the work analysts do by hand today.
The Mergerly team · Bachelor in Digital Economics & Finance, H-Farm College / University of Chichester · 2025/26
In what ways can an AI platform automate and accelerate the deal origination process for Italian private equity and M&A firms?
round 1
round 2
round 3
The thesis isn’t downloadable: it contains confidential information.
I don’t code by hand. I build with AI.
It’s one of the things I’m best at: using AI as a tool to actually build.
I don’t write code by hand. I describe what I want to Claude Code and steer it step by step: I check, I test, I fix. That’s how I built Mergerly (a whole platform, hundreds of routes), the trading agent for the AI-investing experiment, and a pile of everyday automations.
To me it’s a real edge: today a 21-year-old can do, alone and fast, what used to take a team. It all comes down to knowing how to talk to the machine the right way.
I study where finance meets entrepreneurship.
Two academic steps, chosen for the same reason: to learn how to build, not just to study.
Bachelor
Bachelor in Digital Economics & Finance
H-Farm College · University of Chichester
2023 – 2026
The course that blends finance, economics and technology. I chose it because at H-Farm students are pushed to build companies during the bachelor itself. That’s where Mergerly was born.
First Class HonoursMaster's
Master in Impact Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Nova SBE · Lisbon
2026 →
The next step: a master’s in innovation that has impact, at one of Europe’s best business schools. I’ll start it while continuing to grow Mergerly.
IncomingMy bachelor classification
UK system: First Class is the top band, from 70% up.
If you’d like to write to me, I read everything and usually reply within a day.