Portfolio company milestone:
Spaggiari Centenary

July 2026


Q&A: Grouppo Spaggiari's Chairman and CEO reflect on 100 years of history


Gruppo Spaggiari Parma turns 100 in 2026. Founded in Parma in 1926, it began as a publishing house and is today the company behind ClasseViva, the digital platform at the heart of Italian schooling and serving around 6,000 schools and reaching over 5 million students, 600,000 teachers and 7 million parents, with 2.5 million unique users every day. In May 2023, Ambienta acquired a majority stake through its Mid Cap III fund, backing a strategy to consolidate Spaggiari's leadership in Italian EdTech and build the scale to expand across Europe.

 

As Spaggiari marks its centenary this month, Ambienta is proud to celebrate this remarkablemilestone alongside the company.

 

Pier Paolo Avanzi, the fourth-generation entrepreneur and Chairman who led its transformation from publisher to digital platform, Giancarlo Beraudo, Partner at Ambienta and CEO Nicola de Cesare, , reflect on a century of reinvention and what comes next.


Q. Spaggiari turns 100 this year. For a company that long-lived, the obvious place to start is the beginning. Pier Paolo, tell us about its genesis?

 

Pier Paolo Avanzi – I'm the fourth generation of the family. The company was founded in 1926 by my grandfather, and for me it is a very big part of my life. I've been here since the early 1990s and bought the company in 2006. It's my first son, in a way.

 

When I started, this was an old publishing house. We printed forms in black and white. Over the years I realised that if we were to continue growing and serving our customers to the best of our ability, we would have to evolve in line with the wider digitalisation of the economy. So, since taking over the business I have transformed it from a traditional publisher into a digital company, partly through acquisitions and partly by building things ourselves. The market we serve is the same one we have always served. What changed completely is the business model: from physical to digital.

 

Giancarlo Beraudo – There's a line I always use, because I think it captures Spaggiari’s history well: Spaggiari was providing software to schools before software was invented.

 

It's a one-hundred-year-old company, and in a sense the oldest software company you can think of. Long before software existed, schools still had to run their internal processes, registering grades, workflows and accounts, and all of that ran on paper. Spaggiari was the provider of those forms, templates, modules and registers. It invented the school register that anyone who went through the Italian system will remember. It was the household name that schools relied on to run everything except the textbooks. When digitisation arrived, Spaggiari did the same job in a new medium.

 

Nicola de Cesare – It’s a rare thing to lead a company across its hundredth year, and I am truly grateful to be on this journey today alongside Pier, Giancarlo and the wider Spaggiari team. Very few businesses last a century, and Spaggiari has done it by reinventing itself through wave after wave of change. For a company that, in the scheme of things, is relatively small, it sits at the heart of one of the most important parts of the country – the school, where a country builds its future.

Q. Pier Paolo, you led the company through that shift from publisher to digital platform. What did that transformation actually involve?

 

Pier Paolo Avanzi – The turning point came in the early 2000s when schools started adapting to the arrival of the internet. I made a series of acquisitions to bring in the technical and software competencies we didn't have in-house – the capabilities we needed to adapt to an evolving market and to become a digital company rather than a publisher. That's when ClasseViva was born, our electronic register, and it went on to become the established standard across Italian schools. Today our digital platforms reach 2.5 million people a day.

 

Over 30 years we saw a complete turnaround. The market we serve never changed – our focus  was always schools – but we rebuilt the business model entirely, from physical to digital. The hardest part was never the technology. It was changing the culture and the knowledge inside the company, and that takes years. It's a long journey, and you only accomplish it with the right people beside you.

 

Nicola de Cesare – That instinct – to keep adding new capabilities – is in Spaggiari's DNA. Pier Paolo brought competencies in early, ahead of the market, which was decisive in cementing our competitiveness. What Ambienta added was structure around that same ambition: the discipline to pursue it as a repeatable strategy rather than a series of individual bets.

Q. Since Ambienta's investment in 2023, Spaggiari has completed a series of add-on acquisitions. What's the thinking behind them, and what do they add?

 

Giancarlo Beraudo – Buy-and-build was central to the plan from the start. Spaggiari was already the clear leader in Italy, so the goal was to deepen that position and extend the platform across the whole education journey. Each add-on has been chosen to bring a strategic capability rather than simply scale, and each held to the same discipline that due diligence is no longer a founder's instinct; it's a structured, professional process.

 

Our first acquisition, La Fabbrica in 2024, brought digital educational content and a way to connect schools with businesses willing to fund educational projects – enriching what schools can offer beyond what their own budgets could stretch to. Then in early 2026 we added Jobiri, an AI-based career-orientation platform bridging education and the world of work, and Prima Scuola, which took us into the early-years segment. Between them, Spaggiari now supports the full lifecycle, from nursery age through to university and the first step into a career. And most recently we've taken the platform beyond Italy for the first time –extending our strategic and environmental reach internationally across Iberia, Brazil and a number of Latin American markets – which is the beginning of the international chapter that was always part of the thesis.


Nicola de Cesare – From a product point of view, each acquisition widens what we can do for a school we already serve. Market share in the Italian school market doesn't move quickly, so growth comes from combining M&A with targeted product innovation. Once you have the customer base it's these new capabilities that let you do more for them. Spaggiari has always been first to market; we're the only provider that also covers areas like school safety and compliance, which competitors tend to leave alone. The add-ons compound that. Every capability we bring in is another reason for a school to stay with us across its whole journey and increasingly, a synergy we can sell across the base.

Q. What role does environmental sustainability play in a business focused on education software? It's not an obvious connection for everyone.

 

Giancarlo Beraudo – Well, consider it this way:  before software, schools generated an enormous amount of paper – warehouses of records archived for years. And paper is one of the most resource-intensive materials there is: European paper production accounts for around 2% of the continent's primary energy use, and the industry consumes roughly 50 million tonnes of raw material and over 3 billion cubic metres of water a year. Schools alone account for up to 10% of Europe's graphic paper use. Education software isn't the obvious place to look for an environmental thesis, but the connection is direct and quantifiable. Spaggiari has been a key contributor to a 15% fall in paper use across Italian schools over the past decade – around 25,000 tonnes. Even a single add-on shows how concrete this is: our analysis estimated that bringing La Fabbrica onto digital delivery would save around 32 tonnes of materials, the weight of roughly 70,000 books. That's the kind of measurable outcome we underwrite.

 

Nicola de Cesare – And for us in the business, it matters because it's the same thing as serving the school well. The more of the school's processes we can take off paper, the better we're doing our job, and the better the environmental outcome. The two go hand in hand.

Q. Not many companies reach 100 years. If you had to name the few characteristics that got Spaggiari there, what would they be?

 

Pier Paolo Avanzi – The first one, and I'll say it with a smile, is that my grandfather chose the right person. I was always interested in the business from a young age, and by the time it came to take over I'd already spent years learning the ins and outs – not just of Spaggiari, but of our whole sector. In Italy, the most common cause of business failure is the handover from one generation to the next. We reached the fourth generation and managed that succession well.

 

Beyond succession, it's about giving the market the right products. Needs change, and you have to keep developing and selling the right things while changing the business model underneath – that's genuinely hard. The rest is the right management team, a clear vision, disciplined execution, and, I'll admit, a little luck. I was fortunate to find the right people to see it through.

Q. Where do you see the biggest opportunities for Spaggiari over the next five years?

 

Nicola de Cesare – I see two big opportunities. The first is internationalisation. What we've built in Italy – the platform, the processes, the full-lifecycle model – is replicable across Europe, and M&A is how we get there. We've now taken the first step outside Italy, and that's a significant part of the growth story from here. The second is AI.

We've launched a programme inside the company to become an AI-powered business both internally, to optimise our own processes, and in the product itself. Our idea isn't to replace teachers; it's to give them superpowers, so they can spend their time on the children and on education rather than on repetitive tasks that aren't the core of their job. We want a meaningful share of our growth to come from AI features in the product. It's a real opportunity to bring more to our existing customers and to win new ones.

 

Giancarlo Beraudo – It's the next wave. Spaggiari rode the wave of paper, then the wave of software, and is now very well positioned for the wave of AI. That's the thread through the whole hundred years: the same mission, carried through each new medium as it arrives.