An Icelandic HR technology firm has secured $6 million in fresh capital from a consortium of backers including Frumtak Ventures, Swiss Post Ventures, Avant and the family office DRD Investments. 50skills, based in Reykjavík, has built a platform that integrates automated processes, AI-driven agents and human oversight into a single operating system for managing people workflows. The company's dual product suite comprises Hire, an applicant tracking system, and Journeys, which uses AI to construct and execute people processes. With the new funding, 50skills intends to bolster its sales, marketing and community operations while deepening its investment in platform capabilities and AI agent functionality as it pursues growth across Nordic markets and the United Kingdom.

The startup was established by Kristján Freyr Kristjánsson, who serves as CEO and previously founded Startup Reykjavik, Iceland's first startup accelerator. He also held the role of CEO at Icelandic Startups and worked as ex-VP at fintech company Meniga. The company's mission centres on creating infrastructure that enables people and AI agents to execute processes in tandem.

50skills counts among its clientele several of Iceland's largest corporations and recognisable enterprises—Icelandair, Eimskip, Blue Lagoon, Domino's and Securitas—alongside government institutions including the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the City of Reykjavík. The platform has also attracted a widening customer base throughout the Nordic region and the UK.

AI is changing how organisations create value. Our job is to make that practical for the teams responsible for people. We are building the operating system for people workflows, where HR teams design the experience they want for their employees and the platform runs it. The hard part is the balance: deterministic workflows where a process has to run the same way every time, probabilistic agents where a step needs interpretation, and human oversight, governance and security throughout. For HR and people operators that balance is not optional, it is the job. That is what we build, and this round lets us bring it to many more organisations.

50skills co-founder and CEO Kristján Freyr Kristjánsson

Real-world impact across industries

The platform has processed millions of transactions spanning onboarding activities, contract management, employee requests, approvals, background verification, equipment provisioning and access control—work that previously consumed substantial HR team capacity. Several organisations have already demonstrated measurable gains.

Icelandair has automated more than 20 HR workflows and cut the equivalent of four to five months of annual administrative burden from its HR function. The system also reviews over 3,000 health-grant receipts annually against company policy. Air Atlanta has trimmed 50 hours weekly from visa processing through automation. Íslandshótel has slashed the time required to process employee benefit applications by 80% across its 18 properties, with certain cases now completed in as little as five minutes. Samskip has consolidated HR workflows across four separate entities, linking more than 150 onboarding actions to its core systems.

Research underscores the scale of the challenge 50skills addresses. Deloitte has determined that HR departments dedicate up to 57% of their time to administrative and routine work. The Society for Human Resource Management's State of AI in HR 2026 report revealed that 67% of respondents lacked awareness of AI capabilities, while 38% identified insufficient resources as a barrier to adoption.

The limit on AI in the workplace is no longer capability, it is trust. Nowhere is that more true than in HR, where a mistake lands on a person's contract, pay or career. 50skills has built a platform where every step is visible, every action is recorded, and a human decides where judgment is needed. We think that is where this category gets decided.

Avant co-founder Jon Jonsson

How the platform operates

50skills consolidates these operations into a unified environment. HR teams articulate the workflows they require, and the platform translates those descriptions into operational processes linked to the organisation's existing systems. Routine tasks are handled by automation, interpretation-heavy work falls to AI agents, and decisions demanding human judgment remain with people. This approach delivers practical AI for HR teams, enables workflows to launch in days rather than months, reduces errors, accelerates processing and enhances the employee experience.

50skills has turned years of customer feedback into a platform organisations run their people operations on every day. As AI changes how work gets done, the companies that win will be those that bring people, workflows and AI agents together safely and effectively. 50skills has the product, the domain expertise and the customer traction to lead that shift. We are proud to continue backing Kristján and the team.

Frumtak Ventures Partner and Chair of the 50skills board Ásthildur Otharsdóttir

Source: ArcticStartup