The Skills Gap Crisis has been described by the World Economic Forum* as one of the biggest challenges of our time, costing us roughly $11.5 trillion in potential GDP growth over the next decade**. The world’s largest companies are starting to respond by implementing a skills-based approach to address their needs. However, the approach is segmented and limited to point solutions. Helping teams to scale the opportunity (saving time and budget), HR tech startup Skillvue is today announcing a $2.8m funding round for its AI platform to boost better talent allocation, higher capability to anticipate job market shirts and increase retention of high-performers.
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 (age 25) and Simone Patera (age 32), 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 (+107% probability compared to traditional non-skills-based methods), 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 (a key issue for as many as 73% of 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," explains 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 IFF.
"We strongly believe that AI can play a major role in transforming the way HR teams and departments operate, particularly in the realms of recruitment and employee progression. Moreover, the assessment of soft skills is becoming increasingly relevant. Through artificial intelligence, HR departments can now uncover unseen potential at scale in both new candidates and the existing workforce. We are excited to be partnering with Skillvue, as their solution stands at the intersection of these two trends and has already proven to be an enterprise-grade product" commented Edoardo Ermotti, Founder & General Partner 14Peaks Capital.
