FARE INSIEME STARTUP – Ep. 13 – Data Masters, the tech academy that trains people on the future of work #finsubito prestito immediato

They come from a national and international experience and now they have decided to return to the community what they have learned. Because if technology is essential, it is people who set it in motion. Giampaolo Colletti interviews Luigi Congedo, co-founder of Data Masters, for FARE INSIEME STARTUP

FARE INSIEME STARTUP is the spin-off of the FARE INSIEME project dedicated to presenting some businesses that form part of the Primo Ventures portfolio, a company that manages funds specialising in the digital sector and new space economy. Confindustria Emilia has started up a partnership with Primo Ventures with the objective of providing its associates with new opportunities for growth thanks to the presentation of the most innovative start-ups on the market. Here are some of their stories.

by Giampaolo Colletti
@gpcolletti

This story goes
around the world and then returns to its homeland. To create value, to return
what has been accomplished over the years. In this story we are dealing with
that Silicon Valley that over the decades has churned out brilliant intuitions
that have marked the evolution of technology and connectivity, completely
conditioning our lives. Extraordinary ideas where technology certainly exists,
but what matters is something else. Because it is people who put ideas,
business, and the future into circulation. This story starts with human
capital, which always beats technological capital because people shape
organisations, and never vice versa. This is the story of Data Masters, a tech
academy in Bari that was established in 2022 and focused on up-skilling and
re-skilling courses in data science, machine learning and artificial
intelligence. Training first. A way to decode complexity and scale the
potential of the company. A clear objective: to accelerate the productivity of
Italian companies by introducing artificial intelligence skills into the
company. Silicon Valley, as we said before. Because it all started with three
visionary investors who decided to focus on people. The three individuals were
Luigi Congedo, Francesco Cipriani and Vincenzo Maritati. Together they realised
that talent is always at the core of all the greatest successes in the world of
technology. So they decided to launch Data Masters to cultivate training in
these subjects in Italy too. More specifically, Luigi, after more than ten years
in the Silicon Valley and a past as a venture capitalist, decided to take this
important step. «We believe that it
is essential to put the transformation and updating of professional skills at
the core of the current digital revolution»,
says Luigi Congedo, co-founder of Data Masters.

Start-up profile. Today, 16 people work in
the company with the goal of reaching 30 by 2025. «Our target market is made up of young professionals and Italian
companies. In the coming months we will also explore the possibility of
entering the foreign markets. Our growth in terms of turnover in 2024 is +300%
on the previous year, but we measure the impact of our work in many ways,
mainly through the number of people we manage to successfully train in this
sector. We have reached over twenty thousand students, we have released more
than fifty training modules in Italian and we have attracted private and
institutional investors», says
Congedo. Today Primo Venture, Zanichelli Venture and other angel investors,
including international ones, have believed and invested in the company. A huge
passion and awareness of how innovation and artificial intelligence are a
driving force for the progress of society and for the prosperity of our
entrepreneurial fabric. «The
passion, the desire to continue improving and the goal of releasing
high-quality courses without becoming obvious or commercial have remained
unchanged since day one. This also involves having the courage to say no to
many customers, to focus on activities with high added value, putting aside
those with fleeting and non-lasting value over time. Doing business in a
constantly evolving sector, where competition grows a lot and quickly, is
extremely complicated. Our biggest challenge is to balance revenue growth while
maintaining the high quality of our services», says Congedo. But there is more. That is, looking at the entire
world, even those geographically very far from national borders. «The other important challenge is to
compete internationally in a market where Italian start-ups still receive too
little funding and too little support from an institutional and entrepreneurial
system that is still not very inclined to trust the commercial offering of start-ups
with just a few years of experience»,
Congedo specifies.

The value of
specialisation. Among the distinctive features of Data Masters
there is certainly a very strong verticalisation and a push for specialisation
in the training proposal in technical fields. And this is the winning key for
these training-oriented “entrepreneur start-uppers”. Because today there are
few or often no companies that decide to specialise. There are a large number
of training centres, which for commercial purposes decide to do a bit of
everything. «We believe in talent
and specialisation and we are trying to create a centre of excellence,
cultivating increasingly specialised skills, rather than generalising our
proposal and expanding into all the lateral markets», says Congedo. The approach is unique and is based on the choice
to associate training courses with the creation of technologies that help
measure skills. In the coming months, a new e-learning platform will be
relaunched that – in addition to providing many new training modules and career
paths in our sector – will allow users to measure the skill gap at the same
time as studying. The aim is to anticipate the most important updates in the
sector and measure the skills. And in the meantime, to work towards one of the
most longed-for goals: to train 1 million people in Italy in the use of tools
and technologies based on artificial intelligence. Only in this way can we face
the challenges of a connected world.

https://podcast.confindustriaemilia.it/