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Andrea Farina, an entrepreneur with a degree in economics and an MBA from the USA, founded Itway in 1996 in Ravenna, a successful company in the information technology sector. With 180 employees across various locations, Itway stands out for its technological innovation and leadership in cybersecurity. Farina aims to maintain and exceed a turnover of €50 million in 2024, thanks to investments in artificial intelligence and innovative workplace safety solutions.

Farina holds a degree in economics from the United States and an MBA, but he chose to return to Italy, where he founded Itway in Ravenna in 1996. Today, the company is listed on the stock exchange and was created with the goal of scaling in the world of information technology. Farina now works alongside 180 employees spread across Ravenna, Milan, Rome, Naples, Athens, Istanbul, and Ankara. “I’ve always liked Frank Sinatra’s song ‘My Way.’ It’s a way of taking life, of designing your own path and walking it, of making it your own. That’s what I learned in the United States, where I studied. I lived in Silicon Valley, so it was inevitable that I would bring something back with me,” says Farina. That “something” is not just the business model but also the ability to look to the future with courage and foresight.
“The company was founded in Lugo, in the province of Ravenna, in the heart of Romagna, on July 4, 1996, already with partners and investors, following the U.S. model,” Farina adds. The rest was achieved through hard work and a security-focused vision. Itway is a leader in cybersecurity, collaborating with the world’s top players. “Wherever Italians are involved in cybersecurity, they are highly regarded for their creativity and capabilities,” explains Farina.

Itway closed 2023 with a €50 million turnover, a result that entrepreneur Andrea Farina aims to maintain and surpass in 2024. The reason for Itway’s steady growth lies in its vision and business model. “We’ve been investing in artificial intelligence since 2018, particularly in neural networks, and we focus on security,” explains Farina. One of the group’s companies, ICOY, is specifically dedicated to cyber safety, which addresses workplace safety in the cyber world.”
“Our model is already being applied by many companies, especially in the heavy steel industry, where we can offer solutions that help businesses improve both the quality of life for people and workplace safety,” says Farina. One example is Marcegaglia, a company that has always prioritized safety on construction sites. “We were called in by them to equip their machines with high-definition intelligent cameras. This allowed us to monitor the area beneath the overhead cranes that transport extremely heavy iron coils.
The AI algorithm was trained to recognize people, even from a great height, and signal their presence. It wasn’t an easy task because, from that height, a person looks like a tiny dot. We trained the high-definition cameras, enhanced with AI, to recognize a human being even if only a hand is visible. With our intervention, safety has improved enormously,” Farina shares.
Technological innovation applied to construction site problems is part of Itway’s daily operations, focusing on 360-degree safety. “Artificial intelligence, big data, cloud, and cybersecurity are the assets of the future, and we have been working on all of them for a long time, paying great attention to big data, as the digital intelligence revolution generates a massive amount of information.” “ICOY represents a set of innovative systems designed to save lives and reduce workplace accident risks, thanks to cutting-edge AI,” continues Farina, explaining how the group developed an object detection algorithm capable of recognizing people through a single neural network.

Everything is based on the learning of the neural network. In fact, Icoy is in constant improvement because it uses Deep Learning for analysis, which allows it to automatically define a series of features used to classify the content of an image and proceed with self-learning. “In this way,” Farina explains further, “the analysis can be constantly improved as the number of analyzed images increases and is not influenced by the movement of objects.”

Safety in the workplace thus finds a great ally in digital technology and Artificial Intelligence to prevent accidents and care for human beings. This is the goal of many of the group’s solutions: to improve people’s lives starting from safety, in the world of work, both in person and online. The Itway Group is organized into Business Units, each autonomous in its own business and fully responsible for project development.
The parent company, Itway, coordinates and harmonizes the various Business Units. This organizational model allows for combining the decision-making speed of individual units with the solidity of the Group. The unit that deals with cybersecurity and resilience is increasingly at the forefront and uses every technological innovation to ensure safety. 4Science, a company within the Itway Group, also demonstrates great vision and rigor in data analysis. It operates in the market for Big Data, Digital Repositories, and Data Management Systems.
The company works for some of the world’s most prestigious universities, such as Imperial College London, the University of Cambridge, the Coar consortium (Confederation of Open Access Repositories, an association that brings together over 160 members from more than 50 countries representing libraries, universities, and research institutes), the University of Basel and St. Gallen in Switzerland, the prestigious American Harvard University, and the CDL (California Digital Library) of the University of California, resulting from activities following the opening of 4Science’s American office in Kansas City.