Salvatore Palella

Salvatore Palella is an Italian-American business executive and technology entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of Helbiz, an intra-urban transportation company headquartered in New York City. As of 2012, Palella was the part of the new management that took over S.S.D. Acireale Calcio 1946 football club([1]), which is part of the Federazione Italiana Giuoco Calcio, in Italy. He was president of Acireale Calcio from 2012 until 2013.

Palella grew up in Sicily and moved to Dublin at the age of 17, getting his first work experience at the popular fast-food franchise McDonald's. He attended Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, where he began his first company and decided to commit to his business instead of continuing his public education. The company was a vending machine business serving fresh squeezed orange juice called Witamine.In the following years, Salvatore became the youngest owner of a professional soccer team in the world, Associazione Sportiva Dilettantistica Città di Acireale 1946. He was president of Acireale Calcio from 2012 until 2013.

Palella founded Helbiz in 2016 with the vision of providing fleets of electric shared mobility devices to cities.Salvatore launched Helbiz as the first shared electric scooter company in Italy in October 2018 and paved the way for the legalization of the electric scooters in the country and the approval of the micro-mobility decree. One of Helbiz’s core values is to collaborate with governments and individual municipalities to integrate into each local community its multimodal dockless shared mobility service.

As of July 2018, Palella is engaged to model Samantha Hoopes. They have a son named George William Palella.