Zanichelli Venture

Zanichelli Venture is the Italian leading textbook publisher Zanichelli Editore’s investment initiative, focusing on early-stage edtech startups.

We think about edtech in the widest way: «from pre-K to grey», we’re looking for founders building tools that can act as radical power-ups of the learner’s experience while slipping seamlessly into the current education system; or creating alternatives to the current education system with the potential to move from niche to dominant.

We co-invest mostly in Europe and North America, following trusted, local lead investors.

We usually participate in seed, pre-A and A rounds, and we’re ready to keep supporting our portfolio companies with follow-ons in later rounds. We also like to get to know founders and their ideas as soon as possible: feel free to get in touch even if you’re idea-stage or pre-seed!

We will support and finance ideas with the potential to have a positive impact on our future through education at every stage of our life. We will respectfully, discreetly stand by the entrepreneurs who believe in these ideas, from the beginnings and, at least, until that impact leaves its first dent.

We care about each startup in our portfolio getting the full value of a more than 150-year-old education company like Zanichelli can offer, whenever our expertise can be a lodestar because of our history, our mission, our network, our resources; and we believe in getting out of the founders’ way otherwise, if we are not adding value.

We also care about the startup’s long-term self-sustainability and our financial returns. As a corporate venture capital fund, we are happy if our investments also yield collaboration opportunities, insights, innovative thinking and entrepreneurial energy for the benefit of Zanichelli’s digital products designers, editorial staff and IT. But we know that it may be only in the long term after trust between us and the founders has built through intense collaboration and once the startup has fully expressed its full potential as a well-established company, that we can explore together paths to a deeper partnership.

About Zanichelli Editore

Zanichelli Editore has been in the textbook business in Italy for more than a hundred and fifty years.

It has published the first Italian translation of Darwin’s «On the origin of species» back in 1864, Einstein’s «Relativity: the special and the general theory» in 1921, and it’s the market leader for most scientific subjects in middle and high school textbooks.

It’s been developing digital educational products since the late Nineties.