Shakers, a start-up founded in Madrid in 2021 by Héctor Mata (CEO), Nico de Luis (COO), Jaime Castillo (CRO) and Adrián de Pedro (CPO) (pictured), has announced that it has launched operations in the Italian market with the aim of building a tech infrastructure capable of redesigning the way companies and talent collaborate in the long term. To do this, it uses an AI-driven digital ecosystem that offers a fast, efficient and intelligent connection space, through which it connects professionals and businesses for medium- to long-term projects, secure payments and smooth collaborations, ensuring ultra-fast scalability and maintaining high quality during every phase, from matching to payment.
After its first capital increase of one million euros, Shakers immediately began to grow steadily: in 2022, it reached 100 companies and 1,000 freelancers on its platform; in 2023, it exceeded 6,000 registered professionals; and in 2024, it was recognised as one of the fastest-growing tech companies in Europe, winning the start-up competition at the South Summit event in Madrid. With over a thousand projects lasting an average of 6-7 months each, Shakers also brought its technologies to Portugal and the United Kingdom, target markets in addition to Italy, where it also joined the Italian Tech Alliance association. In total, the company has a team of over 100 people working alongside more than 450 companies worldwide, including Microsoft, Inditex, HP, Tecnocasa, Desigual, Telefonica, Accenture, EY, Deloitte, ING, IBM and Atletico Madrid, and more than a thousand Italian talents.
The entry into Italy comes only after important stages of international development and consolidation: these include the €14 million Series A round in 2025 led by Partech, with the participation of KFund, Brighteye Ventures, Athos Capital and Wayra, which supported the expansion of the platform and the acceleration of integrated AI technologies for talent and teams, confirming investors’ confidence in Shakers’ vision as a key infrastructure for the labour market of the future.
In Italy, the mismatch between people’s skills and the needs of businesses is one of the most significant issues on the Old Continent, slowing down the selection process and, above all, technological progress. Italian companies are also increasingly feeling the need for talent capable of navigating complex digital systems, easily handling the most advanced technologies to accelerate Italy’s digital transformation.
To meet the ever-increasing demand for highly qualified technological talent, Shakers provides a pool of freelance professionals selected through rigorous analysis and testing, which only 7% of candidates manage to pass.
Once the project has been uploaded to the platform, Shakers’ AI kicks in with an advanced real-time matching process, which identifies the most compatible profiles and presents one to three ideal candidates, shortening the search time to less than 48 hours. The company can then proceed with interviews to confirm the match and assign the project to the most suitable candidate, choosing from:
- Development: IA, Cybersecurity, Full Stack, Tech Lead, Machine Learning, DevOps, Cloud;
- Data: Data Engineer, BI Analyst, Data Architect, DBA, Quant, Big Data, Analysts;
- Product: Tech Lead, Product Manager, UX/UI, Designer, Customer Service Manager;
- Marketing: SEO and SEM, Social Media Manager, Growth Marketer, E-Commerce, Content Creator.
Once the selection process is complete, the platform generates the contract, assuming full responsibility for legal compliance, simplifying management and minimising risks for the client. Shakers will also take care of continuing the collaboration, which varies from recurring projects, strategic projects or needs in case of peaks in demand, sending the client updates on the progress of the project and allowing them to pay based on the completion of the various stages.
Shakers has recently revolutionised the way the platform works by switching to an agentic model, no longer based solely on algorithmic matching, effectively becoming an intelligent infrastructure. Agentic AI is the new frontier of artificial intelligence, marking the transition from generative or reactive systems (which create content on demand) to autonomous systems capable of planning, making decisions and performing complex actions in digital environments without constant human supervision.
Shakers AI becomes an intelligent co-pilot that speeds up every step: from candidate selection (from 6-8 weeks to 10-11 days), to budget calculation, project definition, team proposals and roadmap generation.
“At Shakers, we offer an innovative collaboration model that combines autonomy, performance and technology to accompany businesses and professionals into the new era of work, where flexibility and specialised skills are increasingly essential requirements. Shakers is coming to Italy both to bridge the gap between the demand for skills and effective collaboration tools, and to offer new concrete opportunities to talented individuals and companies in a country that is home to one of the most populous freelance communities in Europe,” says Nico de Luis in a statement.
“Shakers brings to Italy a true technological infrastructure for skilled work: Agentic AI accelerates every stage of the process, from matching in 48 hours to team definition, while data-driven selection guarantees end-to-end quality and reliability. In a market with over five million freelancers and a significant skills mismatch, this is the platform that can give Italian companies speed, precision and scalability,” says Simone Riva, partner at Partech.
Shakers aims to respond to the structural transformation currently underway in the world of work, driven by the growth of freelance workers across Europe. In Italy, the number of self-employed workers has exceeded five million out of a total workforce of over 24 million, placing the country among those with the highest incidence of freelancers (source: ISTAT, April 2025). This figure represents over a fifth of self-employed workers in the EU and confirms that freelance work is no longer a marginal phenomenon, but a central component of the contemporary economy (source: Osservatorio delle Libere Professioni, X Rapporto sulle professioni in Italia, December 2025). In this scenario of redefining organisational models, there is a need for tools capable of connecting qualified talent with businesses.
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