Founderful leads pre-seed round for Swiss-US startup

Besides Founderful, Anthropos’ financing round saw further participation from Eden Ventures, Exor Ventures, Zanichelli Venture, Alessandro Rivetti and several angel investors across the EU and US. The funds will enable the startup to accelerate its AI Job Simulation technology, expand its catalogue of Skill Paths and AI Simulations with thousands of them to let customers start in hours, and team growth in the EMEA and US region.

Anthropos was founded by Stefano Bellasio and Giacomo Marinangeli after building Cloud Academy Inc, a cloud training platform they started in 2013. The duo scaled the business to over $25M in ARR with Fortune 500 customers like Microsoft, Warner Media, and Deloitte, and, in the process, realized the majority of their enterprise customers were struggling with the same interrelated problems: employee retention and skills development. After exiting the business to the UK's largest tech training provider, Stefano and Giacomo founded Anthropos to help corporates.

Anthropos provides companies with a platform to centralize all their skills, employee experiences and training libraries. On the one hand, companies can map out dedicated paths for every role inside the organization and on the other hand employees can upskill themselves in accordance with the roles they want to advance in. Additionally, companies can constantly assess what skills are relevant for each role and verify which employees have those skills. This is a significant improvement from the status quo of long, convoluted employee questionnaires to ascertain skill abilities. Central to evidencing its approach, Anthropos can verify soft and technical skills at different stages of the employee lifecycle, from hiring to training and progression.

As part of the platform, Anthropos has built its own skills' taxonomy, which currently covers over 60,000 skills and 18,000 job roles. Additionally, it has developed ‘AI Job Simulations’ which helps to screen candidates at scale by placing them into immersive real-life scenarios with virtual customers, stakeholders, and colleagues where they can solve missions that demonstrate their soft and hard skills. Customers can customize the tool for their specific industry. The first batch of AI Job Simulations is scheduled to be published in the coming months.

The platform went live earlier this year, with 5 initial customers in the tech and tech consulting space in the EU and US. The companies have between 200 and 5,000 employees. “Giacomo and I envision Anthropos becoming the solution for companies to manage and develop all their competencies. In a world that will be redesigned by AI in every role, we believe it’s a great opportunity to help everyone transform their careers,” added CEO Stefano Bellasio.

Anthropos is registered in Delaware (US) and has a subsidiary in Lugano. The start-up employees a team of 9 people: 8 based in the EU region and one in the US. “In Lugano we run everything that is R&D and product development”, explained Stefano Bellasio.

Photo by Daniel Kunz: Giacomo Marinangeli and Stefano Bellasio