About

A Rome company building location-aware storytelling.

Ciro is an early-stage company headquartered in Rome. We make a mobile app and a back-end that, given where you are, plays a short story about that place — in your language, with the option of an AR overlay anchored to the real building in front of you. The company was founded in 2024 by Erfan Soleymanzadeh, building on his master’s research at Sapienza Università di Roma.

What we do

Audio guides are linear, plaques are static, human guides are scarce. We think the most useful piece of software a traveller can carry is one that knows where they’re standing and can tell them why it matters. That is the product we are building. The same engine licenses out to museums, cities and education programmes that want to publish their own places — a software layer rather than a one-off audio tour.

Founder

Founder & CEO

Erfan Soleymanzadeh

Rome, Italy

Designer and engineer with more than a decade of work in XR, AR, mobile, and geospatial systems. M.Des. in Design, Visual & Multimedia Communication from Sapienza Università di Roma (2024), where his thesis introduced the Ciro framework. Previous work includes geospatial social products (Vansurf, Vancouver), creative direction and VR labs (Wihan Studio, Tehran), and the Persian online encyclopedia Wikijoo (~70,000 articles, ~500,000 monthly readers).

Languages: Persian (native), English, Italian.

Investors and partners: please write to info@ciroai.com. For a direct line to the founder, erfan@ciroai.com.

Where we’re based

Headquarters
Rome, Italy
Founded
2024
Stage
Pre-seed → Seed
Founder
Erfan Soleymanzadeh
Academic home
Sapienza Università di Roma
Live in
Rome — Italy expansion next

Recognition

Programmes and institutions that have selected Ciro to date.

  • European Parliament · EDEH 2025

    Sapienza Università di Roma · European Parliament and European Commission Office in Italy

    December 2025

  • Startcup Lazio 2025 — Finalist

    Start Cup Lazio — network of Lazio region universities

    2025

  • Maker Faire Rome 2024

    Camera di Commercio di Roma · Innova Camera

    October 2024

  • Sapienza Università di Roma · M.Des. 2024

    Sapienza Università di Roma · Faculty of Architecture · Dept. of Planning, Design, Technology of Architecture (PDTA)

    October 2024

See the full press & recognition page →

Contact

Investors & business
info@ciroai.com
Founder, direct
erfan@ciroai.com
Headquarters
Rome, Italy
Web
ciroai.com