Marco Romagnoli

Marco Romagnoli came into focus on 15 April 2026 when the European Commission approved €211m of Italian state aid for CamGraPhIC, the University of Cambridge graphene photonics spinout he co-founded alongside Professor Andrea Ferrari of the Cambridge Graphene Centre. That approval is, by Ferrari's own account, the largest single grant ever made to a University of Cambridge spinout. Pilot manufacturing facilities are scheduled to open in Pisa and Bergamo in 2028.

Romagnoli came to the co-founding from CNIT (Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni), the Italian national consortium for telecommunications research, where he worked in photonics and optical communications. His PATH is a textbook example of the CNIT research-to-spinout pipeline: deep-tech expertise accumulated inside an Italian national research network, then commercialised through a university spinout with a cross-border co-founding structure anchored in Cambridge.

The significance of the pairing is industrial and political rather than purely technical. Romagnoli's Italian institutional connections were central to the funding strategy: by locating the manufacturing build-out in Pisa and Bergamo rather than Cambridge, the co-founders made CamGraPhIC eligible for Italian state aid under EC industrial-policy frameworks. The result is that the UK retains the graphene IP and the Nobel-prize association while Italy secures the factory jobs and the €211m of industrial capital — an outcome that has become a reference point in the UK debate about lab-to-factory conversion.