We all know ‘if you see something, say something’, but the subject of today’s builder spotlight can be summarized better by ‘if you see something, do something’. In this builder spotlight, we speak to Matteo Demasi. Matteo went from experiencing the frustrating reality of cross-border education first hand, to founding SAPIO to re-imagine digital credentials for students across Europe. The SAPIO skill issuance and verification platform is now working to drag the education sector into the modern age.
Matteo’s journey into entrepreneurship started the way many do, with a pain point. After graduating high school and moving to Switzerland for university, Matteo encountered repeated issues getting his credentials recognized to enroll. “Even with a recognized and valid diploma, I still had to bring stacks of paper to prove I had completed specific courses,” he explains. “And still, I was sometimes told no.” Not difficult to envision, but something that shouldn’t really happen in 2025. Within the EU all member states have signed the Bologna declaration and collaborate on the Bologna Process, a long established effort to ensure that European countries can have compatible standards and quality of higher education. In theory a mapping of qualifications should be possible for students to migrate from one school to another, independent of if that school is in another country. In practice it doesn’t quite work that way, as Matteo and many other students experience.
The issue turned out not to be only an international one. When Matteo later switched to a different university within Switzerland, he experienced similar issues. “They asked me to provide exam certifications, descriptions of the modules that I completed, transcripts of records, etc”. When Matteo delivered the proofs, printed out on paper and delivered in person, he was told the university needed three weeks to validate them. “I was absolutely amazed by the fact that within Switzerland, the universities being only 20 kilometers apart, they could not digitally validate these documents. They still need to have a person going through all the paper documents and check them all by hand. That’s when I really found my resolve that there must be a better more efficient and transparent way where you can verify this.”
From that experience came the idea behind SAPIO, an infrastructure for digital credentials for education, focused on modular, verifiable micro-skills. Initially Matteo researched the topic in his bachelor’s thesis, which won the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts Student Award for best bachelor thesis in 2023. During his research he found that his experiences were not unique to him, but experienced widely. Many students and universities experienced the same issues he found in digitization and verification of educational credentials. Finding Paradym was the final missing link. A practical tool that would help Matteo build the infrastructure and product he wanted to create.
SAPIO is building an open, user-first credentialing platform that uses self-sovereign identity and verifiable credentials to empower students. Instead of asking institutions to trust PDFs and printed transcripts, SAPIO provides digital proofs of learning outcomes, small, stackable, and portable. SAPIO is a two-sided solution. “The platform can be used to create and issue skill qualification credentials, as well as verify them. This means that it brings together skill issuers (like universities, courses, language institutions) and skill verifiers (HR departments, employers, university programs, etc.)”. SAPIO was built to serve both Swiss and EU standards, and is therefore widely usable and interoperable between countries.
What they’re building with Paradym
The SAPIO platform is an education-focused layer on top of the Paradym platform. It uses the Paradym API to create credential templates and verification templates, and to actually issue and verify the credentials as needed.
Using Paradym ensures that SAPIO can focus on building the user-facing elements of their product, instead of running to keep up with all the changes in the decentralized digital identity landscape.
The challenge Matteo is currently working on is how to bring the ecosystem together. Every company has a different verification proces, every university has a different issuing process, and almost no one is aware of the upcoming eIDAS 2.0 digital identification regulation. So they find themselves in a niche industry, working hand in hand with Paradym to build something impactful. The SAPIO team is currently interviewing stakeholders to get a good 360 view of the problems they face, in order to adjust their platform accordingly. They are discussing the platform with schools, employers, and also students. “The students are actually my main motivation,” Matteo says, “when I speak to them I can wee their amazement with the idea of having everything on their phone. They are really excited knowing there is something new which could help them in finding a job, applying for an internship, transfer their studies, and having all their kind of skills in a place and not having to move paper around.”. The product might be aimed at organizations and businesses, but it’s obvious that the intended benefit should be with the end user, the student.
If you’ve studied abroad, changed degrees, or applied to multiple schools, you probably have a story like Matteo’s. Whether it's the three-week credential verification wait or the manual exam cross-checks, millions of students face these unnecessary frictions every year. If you want to get involved with SAPIO’s mission, you can [contact Matteo directly](info@SAPIO.id), or follow their progress on [LinkedIn](linkedin.com/company/SAPIO-ssi).
This interview was held between Matteo Demasi (founder SAPIO) and Ana Goessens (co-founder Paradym & Animo Solutions) on April 18th 2025. For further information on SAPIO you can reach out to Matteo Demasi and follow the company on LinkedIn. Do you want to revolutionize an industry like SAPIO is doing for education? Reach out to Ana or start building on Paradym’s free tier right now!
