The pre-seed funding round was co-led by 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 aimed at assessing the skills and motivation of candidates, making the identification of high-potential candidates immediate. This approach increases by up to 5 times the ability to predict what the actual job performance will be and is particularly strategic for companies that hire a high number of junior candidates or public-facing roles, where the traditional CV is not representative of a person’s real skills.

After the recruitment phase Skillvue is a strategic tool to support HR departments in analyzing their workforce’s skills at scale and in providing objective and parameterised data on skills for their decision-making. This makes it possible to place talent more effectively in the company to retain high-performers for longer and to build career paths and training programs that are more aligned with the real needs of companies and employees . Skillvue’s technology is also compliant with European GDPR regulations and the AI Act.

Skillvue is being used by companies in the retail, large-scale retail, banking and insurance sectors, as well public sector organizations. Clients include the French retail giant Carrefour, Italian bank Credem and Acquedotto Pugliese. It is based in Milan and has a team of 13 people.

“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 center to help companies own a scalable approach to ensure they remain relevant in 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 in our space; recruitment, internal hiring and talent development,” explained Nicolò Mazzocchi, CEO & co-founder of Skillvue.

“Putting skills at the centre of business strategies is now a key element to ensure competitivity both in the short and long term. 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 be adding to our portfolio a company such as Skillvue, which caters to this problem by helping companies revolutionise their approach to recruitment, internal mobility and development thanks to a quick, effective and scalable skills analysis model.” commented Lorenzo Franzi, Founding Partner at IFF.