Meet the 22-year-old student people are calling 'The Italian Zuckerberg'

You may not have heard of him, but 22-year-old Italian Matteo Achilli is quickly making waves in the European tech scene. Egomnia, the career-focused social network Achilli founded in his first year of college, is getting so much attention in Europe that one magazine has gone so far as to call Achilli the "Italian Zuckerberg".

Egomnia helps to match employers with job seekers who are best fits for the job. People who use the site can access rankings of companies based on how well suited they are to work there.

As of this month, Egomnia has more than 250,000 users and 700 companies accessing the site to find potential hires. And though Achilli still attends business classes at Milan's Bocconi University, he's also working on closing partnerships with such giants as Google and Microsoft. He came up with the idea while in his last year of high school.

Italy doesn't have a system of venture capital and incubators, so he enlisted the help of some student coders to build an algorithm and his dad was his first angel investor, helping him to reimburse the coders.

A student at Bocconi University, he made the most of the prestigious business school's network, and when the site launched in February 2012, a thousand students and 20 companies had signed up by the end of the day. However, things really took off when Achilli appeared on the cover of Italy's Panorama magazine, later also appearing in the daily Corriere della Sera and on Rome's RAI television studios.

Achilli now says he plans to make the site available in English as well and he got a taste of the US during a trip to Silicon Valley last summer where he met with many startups. Despite the success he's had, Achilli intends to return to university in the fall. "Sometimes I forget I'm 22 years old," he told the BBC.

However, Achilli considers his youth an advantage, not an obstacle. "Now we are writing the history of the Internet. The real experts are the young people, people who don't have white hair," he said in the same interview. "It's a very real innovation that a 22-year-old is doing this. At the beginning I thought my young age was not good, now I understand that my young age is my success.".