The Founder
Carmelo
Founder, Innerwine
Sicilian by birth, Carmelo moved to Rome to start his career in financial services, then to London in 2013, where he grew into a seasoned director in strategy and business development. Always sociable, he found himself, more nights than not, at the centre of good company and a bottle of wine.
But he never really understood wine. He judged every bottle the way most people do without meaning to — by the moment, by the company, by how the evening felt. Never by the wine itself.
Curiosity about AI eventually pulled him into a side project: building an app. Researching what that app could actually be, he kept circling back to the one resource he'd always had and never used — his sister Francesca, a certified sommelier. Leveraging her knowledge to make wine genuinely accessible to drinkers like himself, people who choose a bottle by feeling rather than by expertise, is how Innerwine came to life.