Skillvue secures USD $2.8 million to expand AI skills platform
Italian HR tech startup Skillvue has announced it has secured USD $2.8 million in a funding round aimed at advancing its AI-based skills assessment platform. The platform is designed to help companies with recruitment, talent development, and internal mobility by adopting a skills-based approach.
The pre-seed funding round was co-led by Italian Founders Fund (IFF) and 14Peaks Capital, alongside investments from Orbita Verticale, Ithaca 3, Spanish fund Kfund, and several business angels. Skillvue was established in Milan in 2021 by Nicol Mazzocchi (25) and Simone Patera (32). The company's technology has already been utilised by large organisations in various sectors, including retail, banking, insurance, and public sector bodies.
"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 time to come," said Nicol Mazzocchi, CEO & Co-founder of Skillvue. "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."
The Skillvue platform employs artificial intelligence to conduct asynchronous interviews that assess the skills and motivations of job candidates. This capability helps in swiftly identifying high-potential candidates, particularly beneficial for companies hiring large numbers of junior candidates or roles where traditional CVs may not accurately represent a person's skills. Post-recruitment, the platform assists HR departments in analysing workforce skills at scale, providing parameterised data crucial for decision-making, enhancing talent placement, and constructing more aligned career paths and training programs.
"Putting skills at the centre of business strategies is now a key element to ensure competitiveness 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 USD $11.5 trillion," said Lorenzo Franzi, Founding Partner of IFF. "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."
Skillvue's platform also ensures compliance with European GDPR regulations and the AI Act. Its client base includes prominent names such as the French retail chain Carrefour, Italian bank Credem, and Acquedotto Pugliese. The company is currently staffed by a 13-member team.
Edoardo Ermotti, Founder & General Partner of 14Peaks Capital, stated, "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."
