Skillvue, an HRTech platform that uses AI to enable companies to adopt a skills-based approach in recruitment, talent development and internal mobility, has recently announced that it has raised $2.8 in a pre-seed funding round was co-led by the Italian Founders Fund (IFF) – the first Italian venture capital created by startup founders and led by Lorenzo Franzi – and Edoardo Ermotti’s 14Peaks Capital. It included participation from Orbita Verticale, Ithaca 3, the Spanish fund Kfund (previously investors in the unicorn Factorial) and several business angels.
Founded in Milan in 2021 by Nicolò Mazzocchi and Simone Patera, Skillvue enables companies to analyze job candidates’ and employees’ skills in a fast, objective and scalable way, helping them adopt a skills-based approach in recruitment, talent development and internal mobility activities. In the recruitment phase, its innovative technology, based on proprietary AI, carries out asynchronous interviews to assess candidates’ skills and motivation, making the identification of high-potential candidates immediate. This approach increases by up to 5 times the ability to predict job performance. It is particularly strategic for companies that hire many junior candidates or public-facing roles, where the traditional CV does not represent a person’s fundamental skills.
Speaking on the fundraising, Nicolò Mazzocchi, CEO & Co-founder of Skillvue, said:
We are making significant strides into a huge problem facing companies. People have been talking about the skills-based approach for recruiting or existing teams and some have taken steps towards this. With Skillvue, we’ve made this front and centre to help companies own a scalable approach to ensure they remain relevant in the time to come. With this funding round, we will strengthen our team with strategic figures, especially in the AI area, expand our business in Italy, get started on our global expansion and consolidate our tech stack on three key verticals, recruitment, internal hiring and talent development.
Following the recruitment phase, the company serves as a strategic tool for HR departments to analyze their workforce’s talents at scale and provide unbiased and parameterized data on skills for decision-making. This allows for more effective talent placement in the company (+107% probability compared to traditional non-skills-based methods), longer retention of high-performers, and the development of career paths and training programmes that are more aligned with the real needs of companies and employees (a key issue for up to 73% of employees). Skillvue’s technology also complies with EU GDPR rules and the AI Act.
Lorenzo Franzi, Founding Partner of Italian Founders Fund, added:
Putting skills at the centre of business strategies is now a key element to ensure short- and long-term competitiveness. The data speaks for itself: as stressed by the World Economic Forum, the skills crisis is one of the biggest of our time, second only to climate change, for a total cost of about 11.5 trillion dollars. That is why we’re happy to add to our portfolio a company such as Skillvue, which caters to this problem by helping companies revolutionize their recruitment, internal mobility and development thanks to a quick, effective and scalable skills analysis model.
Headquartered in Milan, Skillvue is used by companies in the retail, large-scale retail, banking, insurance sectors, and public sector organizations. Clients include the French retail giant Carrefour, Italian bank Credem, and Acquedotto Pugliese.
