Italian Edtech Sirius Game Raises €1.3M to Scale Primary School Play

Italian edtech startup Sirius Game has closed a €1.3 million funding round led by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, with participation from Trentino Invest, Ultra VC, 28Digital and Add Value. The capital will be split across three priority areas: further development of the company’s technology, expansion within the Italian and international education systems, and growth in the corporate training segment. The same week, Sirius Game launched JOY, a primary school product developed with Italian publisher Gruppo Editoriale La Scuola and the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.

The round is a rare moment in which an Italian public development bank has underwritten a company whose product is the lesson itself, not the classroom it runs in. Sirius Game operates as a Società Benefit, a corporate form in Italy that bakes social purpose into the company’s statute. The cheque will test whether game-based learning, still a debated framework in education faculties, can scale inside the formal school system and into corporate training rooms at the same time.

A State-Backed Lender Leads the Round

Sirius Game has raised €1.3 million in a round led by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, the Italian public development bank, with participation from regional investor Trentino Invest, early-stage fund Ultra VC, European digital innovation network 28Digital, and SME investor Add Value. The capital will be directed into the three priority areas, detailed in the announcement of the €1.3 million round: technology development, expansion within the Italian and international education systems, and growth in the corporate training segment. The round arrives as Sirius Game moves from a single product line to a four-line portfolio spanning primary schools through corporate training. The company framed the close as a milestone for a startup that has been shipping playful learning products since 2020.

Sirius Game has named three priority areas for the new capital, in the order the round’s announcement lists them. The first covers further development of the technology platform that underpins all four product lines. The remaining two cover expansion in the Italian and international education systems and growth in the corporate training segment, the two new fronts in the funding mandate.

• Further development of the company’s technology
• Expansion within the Italian and international education systems
• Growth in the corporate training segment

The priorities map to three revenue lines the company is trying to build in parallel: school sales, international expansion, and corporate L&D. Corporate training is the faster-moving channel, with shorter sales cycles than school procurement, in the company’s framing. Sirius Game framed the round as a deliberate move toward building a four-line portfolio on a research-led model, not a feature-led one.

We want to show that learning can be engaging and rigorous at the same time, helping people develop skills that are truly useful to face change.

Laura Cesaro, CEO and co-founder of Sirius Game, said the round will let the company scale the impact of its game-based learning model and expand its reach across schools and companies internationally. She framed the goal as making learning more effective and capable of delivering lasting outcomes, a deliberate distinction from the gamification language common in edtech marketing.

JOY Lands in Italian Primary Schools

JOY is the new product at the centre of the round. The company describes it as a system that turns every primary school lesson into an immersive, shared adventure, blending storytelling, digital exploration, and hands-on experiences into a single learning loop. Each mission invites students to imagine, create, and collaborate, connecting the real and virtual worlds through project-based learning and socio-emotional reflection. The product is rooted in what the company calls evidence-based pedagogy and inclusive design, and ships with ready-to-use, fully customizable materials that adapt to different learning styles.

JOY was built with two named development partners: Italian educational publisher Gruppo Editoriale La Scuola and the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. The product page also lists Riga University, Epson, and 28Digital as associated partners. The product targets the primary school market in Italy. The launch slots JOY into a wider portfolio that now covers four lines.

The wider portfolio includes the new JOY for primary schools, the long-running sirius product for secondary schools (originally built to teach Latin and the classics), a financial literacy track for young adults run with partners including FEduF, the Fondazione per l’Educazione Finanziaria e al Risparmio, and an AI literacy curriculum for businesses. Across all four lines, the company says it has engaged 10,000+ students in 100+ schools. The footprint is, per the company’s own marketing, validated by leading universities it does not name on the public site. The corporate training line, named as a capital priority in the new round, signals a deliberate move toward recurring B2B revenue alongside the school contracts. Sirius Game has framed the corporate training move as part of the same playful learning framework that underpins the school products.

The Five Investors Behind the Cheque

The bank’s founding and public-ownership history: founded in 1850, with 82.77% of its share capital today owned by the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance, the institution has historically financed public works, postal savings, and strategic equity positions in Italy’s largest industrial groups. The state-led mandate, written into the ownership structure, gives the bank a remit to back projects of national interest. Cassa Depositi e Prestiti also manages Italy’s postal savings, deploying the funds into public lending, local government finance, and strategic equity investments in the Italian economy.

The four co-investors each bring a different angle. Trentino Invest is a mixed public-private company set up to invest in Trentino companies, supporting their development projects with knowledge and capital. Ultra VC is an early-stage venture fund. 28Digital is a European digital innovation network. Add Value is an Italian investment company focused on M&A, private equity, and venture capital through club deals, working with small and medium-sized enterprises in their growth phase, with turnover between €1 million and €50 million, and a stated focus on tech areas including IoT, AI, Industry 4.0, robotics, photonics, aerospace, and security.

From a Napkin in Cyprus to a Verona Società Benefit

Sirius Game has a single founder story it returns to. In 2011, a 17-year-old Laura Cesaro was on an internship in Cyprus at the Festival of Ancient Greek Theatre and Drama. Sitting alone in a cafe on a break, she wrote on a napkin: ‘When I grow up, I’ll create a business or foundation that will help the public approach the classics because these subjects are too cool and shouldn’t be domain for the few.’

She did not take the idea on immediately. She struggled with the classics in high school, switched schools twice, and finally fell in love with Greek and Latin through programs that embraced different learning styles. The pandemic pushed her into online tutoring, where she noticed that nothing had changed for the kids she was teaching. With an admission to the Harvard Graduate School of Education and access to the Harvard i-lab, the 2021 profile of Sirius Game’s founder describes how she decided to build the product she wished she had as a student.

Sirius Game is registered in Verona as a Società Benefit, an Italian legal form that bakes social purpose into the company’s statute and reporting obligations. The company has a stated capital of €10,928, a small but deliberate footprint for a startup that has expanded well beyond its original classics-game roots. Over the last several years, the company has built out four distinct product lines, each aimed at a different stage of the learner journey. The new JOY targets primary schools, the original sirius targets secondary schools with a humanities focus, the financial literacy track targets young adults in partnership with FEduF, the Fondazione per l’Educazione Finanziaria e al Risparmio, and the AI literacy curriculum targets businesses. The corporate training pivot, named as a capital priority in the new round, signals a deliberate move toward recurring B2B revenue alongside the school contracts.

The four product lines share a single research backbone, something the company has been explicit about in its own writing. Per the round’s announcement, the four lines will be expanded in parallel under the same playful learning framework. The corporate training line is the third of three revenue streams, alongside primary school sales and the secondary school lines.

Playful Learning, Not Gamification

Cesaro has been unusually explicit about a distinction her company insists on. Gamification borrows from games the surface mechanics (points, badges, leaderboards), while playful learning, the framework Sirius Game is built on, borrows the deeper structure (curiosity, exploration, intrinsic motivation).

The research backbone is real. Cesaro studied with Louisa Rosenheck, who co-authored the foundational playful learning work at MIT, and cites Jan L. Plass, a leading game-based learning researcher at NYU, as a direct influence on Sirius Game’s pedagogical design. A peer-reviewed paper in the Global Studies Dialogues journal has also been published on the Sirius Game platform, exploring how integrating immersive technologies into the classroom influences cognitive and metacognitive outcomes. The company’s published writing explicitly contrasts its research-led approach with feature-led edtech, a positioning the founders have repeated in their own channels.

The Reach the Round Has to Close

The scale question is the open one. Sirius Game’s own marketing reports a reach that, while meaningful for a Verona startup, sits well below what a state-bank-led international expansion implies.

The round’s three priority areas map directly to the gap. Technology development will fund product engineering across all four of the company’s product lines. School expansion work depends on relationships with regional education authorities in Italy and on a sales presence in target international markets. The corporate training segment, the third of the three areas named in the announcement, will open a new line of B2B revenue for the company.

Each priority carries a different cost structure. The technology line funds product engineering across all four product lines. School expansion work depends on relationships with regional education authorities in Italy and on a sales presence in target international markets. The corporate training line, in the company’s framing, is a faster-moving channel that does not depend on school procurement cycles. The mix funds three work streams at once, and the wager’s first report card will come when each shows measurable progress.

The current state of the company, drawn from the company’s own marketing and the round’s announcement, can be summarised in five figures. The figures run from student reach to legal form, all sourced to the company itself.

• 10,000+ students engaged across Sirius Game’s product lines (per company marketing)
• 100+ schools involved in the company’s playful learning programs
• 4 product lines spanning primary schools, secondary schools, young adults, and businesses
• 2 named development partners on the new JOY product
• 1 Società Benefit legal form binding social purpose to the company’s statute

All five are figures Sirius Game reports itself, with no external verification cited.

What a State-Backed Wager on Play Says

The signal in the round is less the size than the lead investor. Cassa Depositi e Prestiti has historically financed public works, postal savings, and strategic equity positions in Italy’s largest industrial groups, per the bank’s own public mandate. The lead on a primary-school playful-learning company sits outside that historical remit.

The corporate training pivot is a meaningful part of the announcement. Most edtech startups operate in one of two markets, school sales or corporate L&D, and few try to do both from a single research backbone. Sirius Game is betting that the playful learning framework, validated in classrooms, can be sold to companies buying AI literacy and financial literacy programs for their staff. The round is structured to fund that test in parallel with the school expansion, per the three priority areas named in the announcement.

The founders have not given a public timeline for international expansion. The capital is, per the round’s announcement, committed to three specific areas, and the wager’s first report card will come when each one shows measurable progress.