Zanichelli Venture, the venture capital fund established by Zanichelli Editore, has announced that it has invested in Gyver, an HRtech start-up that is building a new digital infrastructure for skilled technical roles. The €1.4 million seed round is led by Brighteye Ventures, with participation from Zanichelli Venture, Vento Ventures, Antler and Altitude.
The investment reflects Zanichelli Venture’s vision that markets where digitalisation has not yet taken hold are not neglected markets, but untapped markets. Gyver operates in the sector that Zanichelli Venture identifies as a priority: the bridge between training, certification and access to skilled employment, building the infrastructure that was previously lacking for millions of technical professionals.
“Skilled technical work has been left out of the digital revolution, not because professionals weren’t ready, but because no one had built the right tools for them. Gyver has figured out where to find this audience and how to speak to them. “Our focus isn’t on recruitment: it’s on those who build the career infrastructure for the workers whom the energy and industrial transition will make even more strategic in the coming years,” comments Enrico Poli, director of Zanichelli Venture, in a statement.
Founded in 2025 by Leo Acciarri, Mattia Zarrelli and Francesco Defendi (pictured), Gyver was established to address one of the key structural inefficiencies in the European labour market: the mismatch between supply and demand in the sector for qualified technical professionals, starting with the energy and electrical sectors, such as installers, maintenance engineers and designers.
In Italy, a market comprising millions of workers and hundreds of thousands of new hires each year, around 65% of professionals do not use digital tools to look for work, and companies – 96% of which are SMEs – still rely on word of mouth, according to a report.
Gyver tackles the issue with an approach based on the actual behaviour of these professionals: conversational access via WhatsApp, social-first distribution and a vertical community. Today, it has built a community of 29,000 technicians and more than 10,000 active users. The aim is to evolve into an integrated platform that combines recruitment, training and professional certification.
“These days, electrical contractors have no trouble finding clients and face no competition from abroad. They are people-intensive businesses, built around their workforce: their problem – and their strength – lies in their technical staff. If there are no operational teams, a project simply cannot get off the ground.” “Yet technical staff are still relying on word of mouth to find opportunities: with Gyver, we’re giving them the opportunities they deserve and providing contractors with the tools to stop chasing candidates,” says Defendi.
The funds raised will be used to accelerate technological development, expand the community and strengthen matching and automation processes, with the aim of scaling up the model nationally and, over time, across Europe.
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