Claudio Erba started Docebo while he was still a lecturer, standing in front of university students and teaching them how content management systems worked.
He studied economics and marketing at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. For several years in the early 2000s he was a guest lecturer at the University of Florence, teaching about content systems. In 2005 he founded Docebo, from the Brianza region near Milan. In a 2019 Forbes Italia profile he credited that region for the company's work ethic.
It put a small Italian software firm into a larger market, with a public-market ecosystem to match.
What almost nobody realises is how local it was. For years Docebo was mainly an Italian business, selling cloud-based learning software to Italian customers. There was no global plan, only a lecturer's idea that companies needed an easier way to train their staff online.
In 2012 an Italian venture firm, Principia SGR, put in EUR 2.4m. Erba told EconomyUp in a 2013 interview, 'We bet on digital and we won.' He also spoke about the strain of becoming more industrial as the company grew. In 2013 Docebo opened its first American office in Athens, Georgia.
The real turn was a Canadian cheque. In 2015 Klass Capital invested US$3m, and the company moved its headquarters to Toronto. That is not an obvious thing for an Italian founder to do. It put a small Italian software firm into a larger market, with a public-market ecosystem to match.
The company went to the Toronto Stock Exchange in October 2019 and raised C$75m. Fourteen months later, in December 2020, it listed on Nasdaq and raised US$144m. It uses the same DCBO ticker on both. Docebo today serves customers in more than 90 countries. As of the third quarter of 2025 its annual recurring revenue was US$235.6m and it counted 3,978 customers.
The price of building something this size is that a founder eventually has to step back. On 29 February 2024 Erba moved from chief executive to chief innovation officer. Alessio Artuffo became interim CEO on 1 March 2024 and was made permanent that September.
There is an unspoken lesson in the sequence. The classroom is where the idea formed, and Erba never fully left it: he started as a teacher, and he ended in a role about ideas. A founder does not always need to run the company forever. Sometimes the job is to start the lesson and let someone else lead the class.