Draft:Massimo Banzi

Massimo Banzi (born February 20, 1968) is an Italian designer and enterpreneur. He is one of the founders of Arduino, an Italian open-source hardware and software company, and one of the first advocates of Maker movement.

Early life
Banzi was born in Monza, Lombardia, Italy in 1968. He studied at an ITIS (Italian vocational school) and then migrated to Desio. He starts studying Engineering at Polytechnic University of Milan but dropped out and gets involved in Internet business. He worked at Italia Online, one of the first Internet companies of the country for a while and then migrated to London to work at Worldcom and Sky.

After working as an advisor to Prada, Artemide, Persol, Whirlpool, Victoria and Albert Museum and Adidas in the 2000s, he got involved in the education program of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

Arduino
In 2004, a Colombian student named Hernando Barragán presented Wiring as his Master's thesis at IDII. Banzi was among those that supervised the thesis. In 2005, Banzi, with David Mellis, another IDII student, and David Cuartielles, extended Wiring by adding support for the cheaper ATmega8 microcontroller. The new project, forked from Wiring, was named Arduino.

In early 2008, Banzi along with other 4 co-founders of the project created a company registered as Arduino LLC, At the end of 2008, Gianluca Martino's company, Smart Projects, which was a partner of the Arduino team for production, registered the Arduino trademark in Italy and then founded Arduino SRL along with arduino.org website, copying the graphics and layout of the original arduino.cc of Arduino LLC. This resulted in a rift in the Arduino development team.

Banzi together with Arduino SRL CEO Federico Musto announced the merger of the two companies at the World Maker Faire in New York on 1 October 2016, forming Arduino AG. Around that same time, Massimo Banzi announced that in addition to the company a new Arduino Foundation would be launched as "a new beginning for Arduino", but this decision was withdrawn later. In July 2017, Banzi along with David Cuartielles, David Mellis and Tom Igoe founded BCMI, which acquired Arduino AG and all the Arduino trademarks.