Startup Tales | Matchplat, the scaleup that automates market analysis

Founded in 2017 by two young entrepreneurs from Brescia, the innovative company based in Bergamo has developed Explore, a platform powered by artificial intelligence algorithms that enhances corporate and market data to support the growth of corporations and SMEs. After receiving significant feedback from both clients and investors, Matchplat is now aiming for European expansion with the launch of a new solution: DataHub.

Helping companies identify clients, suppliers, distributors, competitors, and potential partners by integrating official sources, web information, and artificial intelligence to support business: this is the goal of Matchplat, a scaleup based in Bergamo that has developed a platform powered by AI algorithms designed to automate market analysis and supply chain management in the B2B world.

A business idea born from a concrete need: many companies struggle to make the most of the data they generate every day and lack adequate tools to understand the markets in which they operate or could operate. Hence the will and ability to fill these gaps by offering a solution that integrates internal business data with strategic information on 530 million companies across 196 countries.

The background of the co-founders and the launch of the entrepreneurial initiative

Matchplat was founded in Adro (Brescia) in 2017 by two young entrepreneurs from Brescia, both under 30 at the time: Andrea Gilberti and Yuri Sabbadini.

Andrea Gilberti, now CEO and President of Matchplat, graduated in Business Administration and completed a master's degree focused on business processes for startups. He gained significant experience as Project Manager and Business Development Manager at the Brescia-based biomedical company Copan, which he helped grow from €80 million to €500 million in revenue.

Yuri Sabbadini, CTO, has a background in software engineering and gained professional experience at major tech companies, including Microsoft, as well as working as an independent consultant.

"During my experience in the Sales department at Copan," Gilberti recounts, "I was responsible for developing distributors and end customers globally. I realized that companies were still using traditional methods to build B2B relationships, such as trade fairs and business trips abroad. So, I envisioned a digital solution to make this process more efficient, and that’s how the Matchplat journey began."

Funding and Key Milestones

Technological Development and First Investment Round

After dedicating its first year of activity to experimentation, between 2019 and 2020 Matchplat secured a first investment of €1.5 million, entirely allocated to product development.

“In addition to developing the platform, a crucial and still fundamental investment was made in building the databases,” explains Matchplat’s CEO. “To offer our service,” he continues, “we need to have information on all companies worldwide. Data that must partly be purchased and partly built from scratch, before managing this enormous volume of information.”

Relocation to Bergamo and Second Investment

The first market responses were extremely positive, and to strengthen its positioning at the heart of Italy's manufacturing landscape, Matchplat relocated to Bergamo at the end of 2020. At the same time, the scaleup secured a second investment of €3.5 million to organize go-to-market activities in the Italian market.

Third Investment: €5 Million for European Expansion

In light of growing market feedback, in 2024 Matchplat launched its third funding round, aiming to raise €5 million: €3 million of which had already been secured the previous year, with the remaining €2 million to be collected by the end of 2025. The goal is to support the company’s European expansion.

“This journey has been funded by entrepreneurs active in all major industrial sectors, including lead companies with tens of millions of euros in revenue, often initially our satisfied customers who later joined the company as shareholders,” emphasizes Gilberti.

Matchplat’s Technology

Explore: What It Is and How the Platform Supports Businesses

The core technological offering of Matchplat is Explore, a platform launched in 2021 that enables targeted scouting of companies on a global scale. Aimed at a wide range of business roles - from Purchasing Managers to Sales and Marketing Managers, Project Managers, and even CFOs and CEOs involved in M&A operations - Explore enhances existing B2B relationships and quickly identifies new strategic partners. It effectively addresses the common needs of businesses regardless of size or sector.

“With Explore, we help companies move beyond the traditional and fragmented approach to business expansion by offering a tool that integrates data, technology, and strategy,” explains the CEO of the Lombard scaleup.

Using Explore brings two key advantages: on one hand, it offers Matchplat’s clients a unique solution for identifying companies anywhere in the world; on the other, it allows them to do so through a proprietary search engine capable of cross-referencing heterogeneous data.

Expanding the Offering with DataHub

Alongside the platform already recognized in the market, in June 2025 the Lombard scaleup will launch DataHub: a new solution designed to reorganize company data and allow entrepreneurs and managers to extract structured analyses and insights from their own informational assets.

This tool represents another evolutionary step, created with the goal of completing Matchplat’s offering through a suite that both organizes data already held by companies and provides information not yet known.

“In this way, we enable our clients to extract value from their existing B2B relationships and to discover new ones. The current geopolitical tensions and increasingly relevant topics such as ESG transactions make the market more dynamic than ever, requiring companies to fully understand their data. We exist to give them the ability to extract analyses and insights from these data—and to understand the data of the markets they are in or want to enter,” clarifies Gilberti

The Importance of Technological Development for Matchplat

Matchplat is a company strongly oriented toward technological innovation, with one third of its over 50 current employees engaged in research and development activities. The company has an internal R&D team dedicated to software development, overseeing every aspect: from the platform’s user interface to the back end, from training artificial intelligence models to data management.

From an infrastructure standpoint, Matchplat manages its data through proprietary servers hosted in an Italian Tier 4 data center - the highest standard in terms of security and operational continuity - powered 99% by renewable energy.

“The main function of our platform is to retrieve company data and make it interact. We start from a database that includes 530 million businesses across 196 countries, for which we know official data, such as company registries and office addresses, allowing us to geolocate them and filter them based on their industrial codes, as well as general data obtained from Chambers of Commerce, governments, and private companies,” explains Gilberti.

The Alliance with Moody’s

To this are added financial data such as financial statements, ratings, and scorings, made available thanks to a strategic alliance with the Moody’s group. “We are the only company in Europe within Moody’s Analytics' KYC Alliance Program, and one of six globally that are part of it. This allows us to qualify a company using the best data available on the market, which we complement with a proprietary database of 23 billion web pages archived since 2018, one third of which are no longer accessible online,” Gilberti highlights.

Data Integration into Matchplat’s Database

Matchplat’s vast database contains information coming, for example, from websites, aggregators, and social networks: semantic data, essential for understanding what products a company manufactures, who it collaborates with, its internal skills, the patents it holds, and - increasingly central - whether it has a sustainability report. In other words, “everything that is fundamental to profiling a supplier, a distributor, an end customer, and a business partner,” clarifies the CEO of the innovative Lombardy-based company.

Target Market: From Corporates to SMEs

Since the beginning of 2024, Matchplat has undertaken an intense phase of strengthening its regional sales network, with the goal of staying constantly close to its clients. Currently, the Lombard scaleup has around 800 clients, distributed across the national territory and partly abroad (about 10%). One third of these are large companies with revenues exceeding €100 million, while the remaining two thirds are SMEs with revenues between €10 million and €100 million per year.

“Often, we enter through a specific department, with its endorsement allowing us to expand our operations and, consequently, help companies make strategic decisions and implement them using our technologies and our data,” emphasizes the CEO of Matchplat.

The Relationship with Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center

The collaboration between Matchplat and Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center began in 2022, when the innovative Lombard company was already in contact with Intesa Sanpaolo for activities related to foreign markets. “It’s a dual collaboration,” says Gilberti, “which, thanks to the excellent relationship established with the Innovation Center, has allowed us to develop a high-level cooperation, where we are often invited to participate in top-tier events.”

In fact, Matchplat is part of the Business Development portfolio of Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center - a service dedicated to supporting startups and innovative SMEs in finding business partners and investors interested in their solutions - and, thanks to this, benefits from significant visibility through participation in national and international events, such as the 2024 edition of Smau San Francisco.

During these events, the Lombard scaleup has the opportunity to share its evolution, while also illustrating the tangible value generated by its solutions. “On average, at each of these occasions we’re able to close new sales, also because we target a cross-sector audience. Our products are adopted by both SMEs and large corporates, and there are many departments within companies that can benefit from them,” explains the CEO of the innovative company.

The bond between Matchplat and Intesa Sanpaolo grows stronger quarter by quarter, also thanks to the excellent feedback received from clients, who express their satisfaction with the services provided. “This creates shared value, and it’s a model we are replicating with many partners,” Gilberti adds.

The Future of Matchplat

Looking ahead, with the launch of DataHub, Matchplat will also update its communication strategy, addressing various client segments: partner companies with which Matchplat interacts daily, public institutions and administrations, as well as large organizations to which the innovative SME offers its services as a supplier.

“Another element tied to the expansion of our offering concerns the geographic growth of the business, with targeted investments in the European market,” emphasizes the CEO of the scaleup. In this regard, Matchplat has already launched projects in the United Kingdom, where it opened a branch in 2021.

“We have big ambitions both in terms of product and go-to-market strategy. The keyword of our new offering is listening: we’ve always listened to the market, and today this is reflected in an evolution we’re particularly proud of,” concludes Andrea Gilberti.