Italy's Zucchetti bets on Brazil with 10 acquisitions, 1,000 staff
What's the deal? Italian technology group ZucchettiDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has built its Brazilian operation through 10 acquisitions, including HR software firm ElofyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. The company now employs around 1,000 people in Brazil across sectors ranging from management software to retail, beauty, and health. Terms of the deals were not disclosed.
Why now? Chief executive officer Alessio Mainardi laid out the integration strategy at EXAMEDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →'s Clube CHRO event in São Paulo on September 23, 2026. Zucchetti doubled its Brazilian headcount from 500 to 1,000 in about a year, making integration urgent.
What's the endgame? Zucchetti has operated in Brazil for 15 years. It first arrived hoping to sell access-control systems around the World Cup and Olympics, but that plan stalled. Buying established Brazilian firms became the faster route to learn the market and adapt Italian-made products.
Mainardi framed the logic in financial terms. "One thing is to hire people and start running up costs deeper in the red every day. Another is to have a company that keeps turning a profit, small or large, but without that absurd pressure to move from red to blue," he said (translated from Portuguese).
The first purchase was a management-software firm in Mogi Mirim, São Paulo state. Zucchetti then expanded into ERP systems and point-of-sale software, buying three companies in Concórdia, Santa Catarina.
What could go wrong? The main challenge is people, not systems. Zucchetti must reconcile processes from its Italian headquarters with the cultures of the Brazilian firms it absorbed — a common strain for companies that scale through acquisition.
The signal: Growth by acquisition is reshaping the HR agenda at fast-scaling tech companies, where merging teams with different histories now sits alongside integrating clients and software. Zucchetti's Brazilian build-out shows how a foreign group can enter a market by buying local knowledge rather than building from scratch.
Read more: exame.com
Image credit: jdlasica
