Milan, October 2, 2024 – Lifeed, an edtech company that has been revolutionizing the workplace since 2015 by highlighting soft skills from every aspect of people’s lives, has successfully completed a bridge investment round, initiated in 2023, for a total of €3.5 million. The investment was subscribed by the Startup Relaunch Fund, managed by CDP Venture Capital SGR S.p.A, Opes Italia Sicaf Euveca, SEFEA Impact SGR, and Hungarian firm Impact Ventures, already an investor in Lifeed.
The investment round will both strengthen Lifeed’s offering through the use of generative AI and support its expansion into high-potential international markets through partnerships with leading human transformation companies. Additionally, Lifeed aims to consolidate its presence in the Italian market, where it already has over 100 corporate clients and 70,000 users.
To support this new phase in the company’s growth, Salvatore Pugliese, former CEO of Brown Editore S.p.A and TF Group S.p.A, joins the board as CEO. He will bring significant managerial expertise and lead a new phase of growth, heavily focused on technological innovation, consolidating the Italian market, and international development.
Riccarda Zezza, who co-founded the company and led it for its first 9 years, securing investments both in Italy and abroad, and earning recognition as one of the world’s most innovative and inclusive practices for skills development in the Ashoka and McKinsey & Company study “The Skilling Challenge,” takes on the role of Chief Science Officer. Her focus will be on expanding the company’s scientific impact and defining its research and development strategy, with an increasing emphasis on data and artificial intelligence.
Thanks to its Life Based Learning methodology, Lifeed offers organizations a digital development platform that measures and maximizes human potential throughout the organization. By valuing all of their life skills, companies improve performance, increase retention, and enhance employee engagement. The platform’s algorithms enable a personalized experience for each user, structured in three phases: discovery, activation, and measurement. The mobile-first platform uses AI to create an immersive learning journey with a high completion rate (over 90%), ensuring HR teams can quantitatively measure the results achieved in human potential development, useful for certifications and ESG reports.
“This bridge investment round positions Lifeed for an ambitious growth plan, fully embraced by our partners, and will allow us to enter 2025 by opening new markets, some of which have already been identified, such as Mexico, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, while others are yet to be determined. I chose to take on this challenge because I believe that in an increasingly ‘AI-centric’ world, frantically focused on automating processes and operations, there are human capabilities that will never be replaced: empathy, creativity, critical thinking, for example. My goal is to work with Riccarda Zezza and a highly valuable team to offer the market a revolutionary platform capable of measuring talents’ potential, giving AI its rightful role as a co-pilot, not the absolute pilot,” stated Salvatore Pugliese, CEO of Lifeed.
“I am very proud of this milestone, and I know that Salvatore Pugliese’s leadership will bring Lifeed into a new phase of growth: it is a ‘generational handover,’ from founders to a qualified top management team, which only the most fortunate startups can afford when aiming for the scaleup phase—an achievement less than 5% of startups reach*, so we have reason to celebrate. We are fully focused on human development: the ‘soft’ part, which seems harder to impact, but ultimately influences everything else. We do this by revolutionizing education: a learning experience that adapts to people’s lives, turning them into a continuous training ground for soft skills. This method breaks the stereotypes that limit the abilities of so-called ‘minorities,’ doubling productivity, engagement, and leadership of women, youth, aging workers, parents, caregivers, and returners,” concluded Riccarda Zezza, Founder of Lifeed.
The investment round and development plan come 10 years after the publication of “Maam, Maternity as a Master,” the book written by Riccarda Zezza, which laid the foundations of Lifeed’s model, launching the entrepreneurial adventure and market innovation of the author, who is now further renewing it with the potential offered by AI.
