Gianluca Tirozzi: “This is how bitCorp will conquer metaspace!”
Interview with the co-founder of a cutting-edge startup in the field of security computing, working on a “low cost” quantum PC
Born in Florence in 1975, with a PhD in Applied Social Sciences from the University of Rome La Sapienza with top marks, Gianluca Tirozzi is a multifaceted figure.
“I have been involved in intelligence and counter-terrorism in Italy and abroad on behalf of the State for over twenty years, with long stays in Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia and Somalia,” he says.
Deep connoisseur of pan-Islamic cultures and Arabic language, he is also a lover of contemporary art and rock music. He collaborates with “Rivista Marittima”, a popular scientific periodical of the Navy and has several scientific publications to his credit, including a monograph from unpublished sources on terrorism, “D’incanto il terrore – storia di combattenti e pazzi furiosi”, published by ACAR, and a novel, “Mai più”, published by Arduino Sacco.
In 2018, together with Christian Persurich, he founded the company bitCorp, “in an attempt to bridge those technological gaps that limit the action of intelligence and national police due to a lack of attention to the sector both by the scientific community and the world of business tricolor.”
The presentation of bitCorp’s “Zadig” protection system (in italian)
The “brand manual” of bitCorp founded by Gianluca Tirozzi and Christian Persurich
What is your relationship with Switzerland and why did you decide to join the Swiss Federalism association?
“Switzerland is a strategic market for those who want to propose themselves on the international scene, an example of multiculturalism and integration based on respect for common rules. Seducing the Swiss means offering effective and efficient products. As the Latins used to say: ‘facere non loqui’…”.
How would you describe your company? What can you tell us about the development of bitCorp? What are its mission, values and vision?
“We are a vanguard. On a technological level, we have been to date, to mention some of the goals achieved in our first three years of life, the only Italian company to develop a proprietary Intrusion Detection Prevention System (IDPS), to patent an IT &Telco communication system based on the Blockchain paradigm, to invent a new method of telematic interception, at the sole service of the State, which we have called ‘hybrid’, on which we cannot provide further elements for reasons of confidentiality that the reader will well understand. In short, a laboratory powered by great skills and many ideas. Our engineers, mathematicians and cryptographers, under the expert guidance of Gabriele Edmondo Pegoraro, our CIO, think of one thing and do a hundred, as they say. For me and my partner, Christian Persurich, it is therefore imperative to put them in the best conditions so that no brilliant idea is overlooked and every second spent by them in the company is a satisfying and obviously productive second. For this reason we are trying to structure bitCorp by external lines, through strategic acquisitions, thanks also to the great trust granted to us by the national banking system and by Italy, through its development agencies. In this way we will be able to grow rapidly and recover the necessary resources to develop what have been paying research paths, which have led us to a technological supremacy that we need to maintain today. If I had to define the mission of Bitcorp, I would frame it as an action of defense of the commitment of each individual, protecting goods, privacy, integrity and good name of people, and of push towards the progress of the community, developing new information technologies to protect what can now be defined as the metaspace”.
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What projects do you have in the pipeline and what do they consist of? Which are the flagship products of your business activities and which are worthy of development?
“TEP, or Transport Encrypted Protocol, is perhaps our most ambitious project, the one we are focusing on most in the long term. We have obtained the patent and are now setting up a working prototype. It is a telecommunications system that leverages the Blockchain paradigm for transaction security and circuit dematerialization for infrastructural lightening and eco-sustainability. Ideally, the scope of the invention could allow the creation of an alternative protocol to TCP/IP in IT and GPRS in Telco, ensuring a new balance, even geopolitical, in the control of operations in those domains. Clearly the development of TEP does not allow today to sustain the company, which is investing a large part of its profits in it. The company’s subsistence and the continuous increase in turnover, more than 20% in 2021 compared to 2020 despite the pandemic crisis, is guaranteed by the commercialization of Zadig, our proprietary IDPS, currently under POC with Poste Italiane. It is an expert Artificial Intelligence system capable of identifying possible threats to a network, preventing them, and initiating remediation processes. Extremely versatile, it lends itself to intervene both on business networks of enterprise size and on small domestic networks, adopting hardware systems of different sizes, from industrial blade servers to a raspbarry PI. The same versatility, combined with the use of specific sensors, allows to exploit Zadig also outside the specific information technology (IT) sector, therefore in OT and IOT. In this regard, we would like to mention the Bitwaste and Bitwa projects: the former is dedicated to the monitoring of the waste cycle, the differentiation of waste materials and the protection of the necessary infrastructures (from the bin to the truck to the landfill); the latter is aimed at the security of passenger transit hubs (airports, railway stations and buses) and is capable of scanning bystanders, recognizing somatic features of interest (from the identification of wanted persons and fugitives to the simple comparison of the image accompanying the document with that of its bearer). Finally, we are grappling this past year with quantum computation. We have already tried to realize a low cost quantum computer with ions, thanks to the support of the Lombardy Region: unfortunately we had been too optimistic and, at the end of the tests, we realized that the road is still uphill even if we have a clear path to beat. Certainly, with more resources in terms of money we would accelerate the achievement of such ambitious results, the team is there: now it needs far-sighted investors”.
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How do you fill your free time? Is there anything you’d like to do that you haven’t had the opportunity to accomplish yet, the very famous personal “dream in the drawer”?
“During my free time I love to be with my wife, absolutely my best friend, and my children, who are my life. Going out together for me is like drinking water after running: pure pleasure. We travel a lot, whenever we can, from the sea in Calabria to the mountains in Alto Adige. I also love reading and going to the cinema with my mother: a weekly appointment, otherwise she makes me sulk, and that in COVID-19 time has turned into watching heart-pounding TV series. At almost fifty years old, I can say I’m satisfied: I’ve had a lot of very special experiences, dealing for over 20 years with intelligence and terrorism on behalf of the Italian State, I’ve seen places and met people that I could at least define as ‘out of the ordinary’, as I tell in my book ‘D’incanto il terrore – storie di combattenti e pazzi furiosi’. Currently, the dream in the drawer is to see bitCorp establish itself and with it my new entrepreneur ‘me’, obviously together with Christian and the guys who represent its soul. I’m proud to have been able to create with my partner such a stimulating environment, animated by young professionals, starting from our elegant, tenacious and talented administrator Greta Scarpa, with brilliant studies behind them, who have chosen us to grow further and consolidate their already rich knowledge. For this reason my dream is to see bitCorp become great, to see grow in it those who have already made it important and that will surely make it great: Greta Scarpa, Gabriele Pegoraro, Luca Piccirillo, Paola Turisi, Gabriele Piazzolla, Annunziata Laurenda, Aurelio Canino, Andrea Brancaleoni, Marilù Pagano, Marco Ferrarini together with all those who collaborate with us from the outside”.
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What do you expect from your co-workers and friends? What attitudes bother you the most and what attitudes do you appreciate in others? Are you a tolerant person, or do you find it difficult to forgive misunderstandings or insults? What “sanctions” or reward mechanisms do you adopt, if any?
“I do not like to demand from people, I prefer to ask, convince, persuade, tolerate. If I really can’t reconcile, then I distance myself. Both collaborators and friends are chosen by me and for this reason they do not express the ‘graniticity’ of those who do not accept comparisons and dialogue, a key opening for the encounter of different experiences and to avoid pretensions. There are few things that bother me, and among them the worst is certainly the lack of compassion towards others. Not knowing how to see others with compassionate eyes is one of the irrefutable proofs of stupidity: life is like a trip on the highway, you never know how the trip will go until you get there. I appreciate courage and loyalty in others, two qualities that characterize my partner Christian Persurich. We have known and been friends for over twenty-five years, since the days of the Carabinieri’s Marshal School and then together with the ROS to counter the subversive threat: he is for me the brother I don’t have, before being the best partner I could wish for a venture. I always forgive, I am deeply persuaded by the Christian message and I believe that life presents each one with too many burdens to add any for mere revenge. I’d rather enjoy a smiling existence than wallow in resentment. The ‘rewards’ for me are to show love and altruism, for those who work with me and Christian this translates into excellent pay, freedom of professional and personal expression and much, much deserved flexibility”.
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What are your biggest regrets and regrets? Is there anything you have regretted doing or, conversely, not doing, in life as well as in your career? Why?
“I have no major regrets or regrets, on the one hand I have been lucky and on the other hand I am an optimist by nature seeing the glass always half full. Everything I’ve done, mistakes and failures included, which almost for everyone are definitely more than what we consider to be ‘victories’, has made me what I am today: a man who values himself and likes himself. I delight in thinking that I am a good man.”
What was your experience like as a finalist for the “Swiss Federalism, GCBL and Milton Friedman” International Prize for Innovative Start-Ups/SMEs, held in Zurich on September 18, 2021?
“I experienced it with great enthusiasm from the stories of Christian (Persurich, ed.), who was a guest in beautiful Zurich while I was in the Horn of Africa for work. Receiving a Swiss award is a source of great satisfaction for us, a medal on our chest that encourages us to continue on the path we have taken, where doing business is, above all, to propose ourselves as a model of development, governance of talent and construction of a community”.
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How do you see the evolution of the market in which you operate and the relationship with competitors?
“Unlike traditional markets that are less dynamic in terms of innovation, the cyber security market expresses an unbalanced dichotomy between ‘those who have’ and ‘those who do’, where the former are decidedly more than the latter. This is understandable given the sudden explosion of the sector in the last ten years and the impressive turnover to be conquered, which justifies the entry of capital into the sector with its typical voracity. Often, in fact, we witness the conquest of large slices of the market by companies that have little to offer from a technological point of view per se, but that guarantee business continuity and structures. This happens because this type of reality is the result of operations built from capital to technology. In fact, when the need arises, they go looking for content among those who instead face the market, such as bitCorp, starting from technology and then arriving at the capital. This is not meant to be a criticism of that kind of approach to the market, let’s say a legitimate financial approach. We have come across several realities of this type and I must say that many of these operate a serious search for talents and technologies, collaborating with great respect with us small and young realities despite the absolutely unbalanced power relations. The same thing has been observed when we have come across realities born at the dawn of the concept of cyber: giants consolidated with years of research, work and success. This kind of attitude on the part of multinationals in the sector, some of which have been pleased to visit us in Milan from the United States and Israel, together with large Italian industrial groups with which there are now profitable collaborations (for example, Leonardo, Elettronica), has been a real revelation for me and Christian (Persurich, ed.). The fact that they have sought us out, made us work and established a relationship on an equal footing between us and some of their administrators, to whom we can turn for even trivial suggestions and advice, gives us hope for the evolution of a humanity, and not only of a type of market, capable of focusing more and more on solidarity and less and less on competition. Winning yes, but fairly and only if you deserve it”.
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What risks and opportunities do you see in the future in cybersecurity, including at the geopolitical level?
“One of the biggest business opportunities in cyber security is for me represented by global connectivity, which will accelerate the processes of cultural amalgamation, one day offering equal opportunities to a Somali and a Swede. For this reason we are already developing with Zadig the first Social Security Network (SSN) as we presented it this year at ITASEC. In fact, the development of shared Artificial Intelligence models will allow to inhibit the new adversarial machine learning strategies used by hackers to violate our networks. Hackers continue to represent the most fearsome threat, especially in a society that is increasingly automated and therefore increasingly vulnerable cybernetically. Soon there will be organic hackers of terrorist groups, able to hijack a train in New York working from a basement in Djibouti. A circumstance that in the near future could be encouraged also by hostile powers in order to cause damages to goods, things or people. Just this kind of actions, together with cyber espionage, soft power operations and political, economic or social conditioning carried out through the network and social media (think of the Cambridge Analytica scandal) and the more and more imminent cyber-war operations, represent the main threats to the stability and security of peoples. In our popular section, called News, on the website www.bitCorp.it, we have often dealt with multi-domain military operations, a capability that will increasingly assume the weight of a deterrent and therefore an important new geopolitical lever for future balances”.
Have the Lombardy territory and institutions helped you in any way? Did the birth in Italy complicate the genesis of bitCorp?
“Despite the fact that I was also prejudiced by the idea of an Italy that is immobile and does not pay much attention to private initiative, where doing business is very complicated, I had to change my mind. From the Lombardy Region we have obtained an incredible financial support, through about 300.000 euro of total help that, in addition to allow us to develop our two products, one for cyber security and another for cyber intelligence, has also put us in condition to develop a prototype of low cost quantum computer, still object of our studies, supporting therefore in an important way the research. Even the central government has not been outdone, through Invitalia, both with the funding ‘Smart & Start’ and with the vouchers for innovation with which we have paid the consultancy for the internationalization, EU, USA and India of our patents in Telco, but also as the main customer of bitCorp in these early years of startup. Speaking of patents, we were astonished when we obtained, on June 30, 2020, our patent called Transport Encrypted Protocol (TEP), a secure data transmission protocol that applies the Blockchain paradigm to telecommunications, we were summoned to Palazzo Chigi, the following July 9, to explain the invention to the President of the cabina di regia Benessere Italia, Professor Filomena Maggino. In short, Lombardy is a region that is attentive to innovation in a country that is evidently just as attentive. Even the national financial banking circuit has supported us in a way I would never have expected: in particular, Intesa San Paolo follows us with great attention and care, having provided up to now timely support to all our initiatives, even in possible acquisitions currently at an advanced stage of negotiation”.
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