Founded by Renato Soru and Domenico Dato — who retain 45.4% and 14.7% of the company’s capital respectively — Istella has developed over the years a unique technological asset in the European landscape, based on proprietary infrastructure dedicated to large-scale data collection and analysis. Over time, the system has indexed more than 6 billion web pages — about half of them in Italian — over 4 billion social interactions, and hundreds of millions of multimedia contents, generating a vast knowledge graph: a “map” that links millions of pieces of information and enables AI not only to understand them but also to use them with greater accuracy.

The availability of this massive knowledge base enables the training of state-of-the-art multimodal Large Language Models, tailored to Italian language and content, while offering wide freedom in customizing and creating generative AI services and models built around companies’ vertical domains and proprietary data.

Thanks to advanced modules for linguistic analysis, deduplication, entity recognition, and normalization, as well as international patents on proprietary machine-learning techniques, Istella has developed one of the largest and most refined knowledge bases in Europe, ideal for training highly performant AI models. The datasets produced by the company have already been adopted by major global organizations, including some of the world’s leading tech companies.

The availability of a broad and independent data base built in Europe provides the Group with a strategic asset for training linguistic models that are more accurate and aligned with the Italian and European context, reducing dependence on uncontrolled external sources. Building a European knowledge infrastructure—precise, localized, and representative of the needs of financial institutions, enterprises, and public administrations—is a core element of the vision shared by Deda and Istella.

The transaction highlights the combination of Istella’s advanced technology and Dedagroup’s deep sector expertise. In financial services, AI will become a driver of transformation, supporting credit management and improving efficiency in high-intensity operational activities; in insurance, it will promote back-office and BPO process automation; in the fashion and retail supply chains, it will contribute to optimizing production, supply chain management, and product lifecycle; and in Public Administration, it will accelerate administrative process automation and optimization, enhance citizen services through natural-language interaction, and support increasing interoperability and accuracy for a more data-driven public sector. Across all these domains, AI thus becomes a strategic tool to increase efficiency, automation, and process quality.

A key aspect will be full control over the proprietary ecosystem and the ability to directly integrate agentic AI layers into Dedagroup’s software, thanks to specialized Small Language Models based on Istella’s model and adapted to various application contexts. This integration will enable the creation of AI solutions capable of “reasoning” and acting directly within operational processes, automating complex tasks and supporting decision-making in a safer and more contextual way.

“Promoting Italian excellence in software and application development, as well as bringing to market the best solutions available to meet and anticipate our clients’ needs for business growth and acceleration, is a cornerstone of our mission. The acquisition of a stake in Istella reflects this vision and represents another step toward our goal of defining a European response to general-purpose AI models — a response based on data and expertise built in our country,” says Marco Podini, Executive Chairman and CEO of Dedagroup. “With this evolution, Dedagroup governs the entire technological and intellectual lifecycle: from infrastructure to proprietary mathematical and linguistic models, integrated into dedicated platforms and supported by targeted domain-specific training. We are not simply integrating a technological platform, but a knowledge engine which, combined with our verticals — from finance to fashion, from public administration to industry — enables clients to extract value from AI with maximum control, through proprietary, secure solutions tailored to the regulated contexts in which Italian and European organizations operate.”

“We have always believed that Europe should develop its own web-search infrastructure, its own knowledge-collection systems, and its own linguistic models based on high-quality data and Italian expertise. With Istella, we have followed precisely this path. We first built large search engines for the Web and then made these technologies available to enterprise clients such as Istituto Treccani, the Senate of the Republic, Infocamere, and many others. Dedagroup’s entry into our share capital is a decisive step for us, as it allows us to secure the resources needed to continue developing state-of-the-art technologies and to play a leading role in supporting technological sovereignty and the Italian economy,” adds Renato Soru, founder of Istella. “We are convinced that, together, we can accelerate the spread of a European generative AI — transparent and compliant with the regulated environments in which enterprises, financial institutions, and public administrations operate. Together we will be more effective in promoting the use of artificial intelligence within the public sector and Italian companies, as a true engine of growth, innovation, and competitiveness.”

Istella’s proprietary technological infrastructure will be progressively enhanced also through the use of Intacture, the sustainable underground data center in which Deda participates, creating an architecture in which computational capacity, data quality, and proprietary language models converge within a fully controlled environment. This integration reaffirms Deda’s commitment to continued investment in building responsible AI, with solutions leveraging synergies between enterprises and universities in a co-creation approach that supports both business and society.

Dedagroup was assisted in the transaction by A&O Shearman and Studio Scozzi Commercialisti, serving respectively as legal advisor and tax and financial advisor.
LEAD Studio Legale assisted Istella during the negotiation.

L’Economia del Corriere_ 08.12.2025