The AI startup ecosystem in the Nordics has been gaining much greater recognition of late thanks to startups such as Lovable, Databutton, Legora, Tandem Health and Sana.
These companies and others have become role models and sometimes breeding grounds for others. Some founders who have already succeeded with one AI company are now onto their second, like AI startup Opper, which is integrating AI into applications. Its founders exited their machine learning startup, Unomaly, five years ago.
So, which are the other early-stage AI startups coming out of the region? Sifted asked five investors to share some names (so long as they haven’t invested in them!)
Guillaume Durao, general partner at Emblem
Alice, Denmark
Alice.tech has developed an AI-powered personalised learning platform where students upload study materials and receive adaptive notes, quizzes, flashcards and simulated tests. It operates on a freemium subscription model, with pro-tier plans for more advanced features, alongside institutional partnerships with universities and high schools. Earlier this year it attended YC.
Founded: 2024
Latest funding: €4.2m seed round from Cherry Ventures, Y Combinator and PSV Tech
Dream Stories, Sweden
Provider of personalised storybooks for children designed to create unique reading experiences. The company offers customised books that feature individuals as characters and has a subscription service.
Founded: 2024
Funding: unknown
Tzafon, Sweden
Tzafon is a new AI lab based in Stockholm, Tel Aviv and San Francisco, developing foundational models that interact with computers like humans — clicking, scrolling and typing at the pixel level. Its approach trains models not just on text and images, but on collaboration and real-world computer use, enabling multi-agent systems to solve complex tasks together.
Founded: 2025
Latest funding: $4m in a seed round from Streamlined Ventures and Wave Ventures
Sabina Wizander, partner at Creandum
Polar, Sweden
The fintech startup is building payment infrastructure for AI-native SaaS companies, described as a simpler “Stripe 2.0” for the new era of software developers. It was founded by Birk Jernström, who is also a cofounder of social shopping website Tictail, acquired by Shopify in 2018.
Founded: 2022
Latest funding: $10m seed round led by Accel earlier this year
Strawberry Browser, Sweden
Strawberry Browser is building an agentic browser that flips traditional browsers like Chrome on their head. It has developed an open-source platform designed to create web-based tools for AI agents. The company’s platform offers a Python SDK, providing developers with tools to build AI agents capable of performing tasks, enabling them to authenticate, interact with and extract data from any website.
Founded: 2023 (as Dendrite Systems) by Charles Maddock
Funding: unknown
All Gravy, Denmark
All Gravy is an AI-first employee engagement platform for restaurants and retail. It builds a product that improves the work experience for frontline staff — and, in turn, the customer experience.
Founded: 2020
Latest funding: $2.9m round co-led by Scale Capital and Moonfire Ventures in 2025
Oliver Molander, general partner at Zenith Ventures and Inception Fund
Ethira, Sweden
Ethira is building a next-gen risk and resilience platform, transforming how organisations manage operational risk. Powered by agentic AI, Ethira helps companies stay ahead of growing regulatory cyber resilience demands by shifting from reactive compliance to a proactive system of visibility, automation and intelligent action.
Founded: 2025 by Jasper Mills, Lucas de Araújo, Fredrik Ygge
Funding: unknown
Agaton AI, Sweden
Agaton AI is a Stockholm‑based B2B SaaS startup that develops voice‑enabled, domain‑specific AI agents designed to revolutionise sales and customer service teams. Its “coworkers” join a team’s tech stack and then listen into calls, analyse them and respond with feedback.
Founded: 2020
Funding: $4m pre-seed in 2021 by Aligned VC, according to PitchBook data, and it raised an undisclosed seed round earlier this year by Foundry Ventures.
Zero, Finland
Founded by the cofounder of the advertisement platform Smartly, Tuomo Riekki, and operator Santtu Koivumäki, Zero is building an AI-powered “zero-click” CRM. By unifying scattered data and eliminating manual workflows, Zero seeks to replace traditional go-to-market tools with an intuitive, fast and comprehensive platform.
Founded: 2024
Latest funding: $2.7m in a pre-seed led by 20VC, with participation from 20Growth, 20Product, Discovery Ventures, Illusian, Greens and Tiny VC in December 2024
Antonia Eneh, CEO of Wave Ventures
Aris Machina, Sweden
Aris Machina is building AI-native software and operating systems to optimise and manage manufacturing processes in industries such as batteries, semiconductors, bio-pharmaceuticals, robotics and defence. Aris Machina was founded by Northvolt’s former VP of AI and software engineering Siddharth Khullar and Northvolt former CEO and cofounder Peter Carlsson.
Founded: 2025
Funding: According to local reports, it has raised around $10m from Earlybird, Village Global, AENU and Planet A
Ovido, Finland
Ovido is building an AI-powered product data infrastructure platform that handles complex supply chain data handling by replacing manual, fragmented workflows with automation for compliance and traceability.
Founded: 2024
Latest funding: €2.4m by Lifeline Ventures and Kvanted
Vesence, Sweden
Vesence is building AI agents to ensure every project and document meets firm-wide standards starting with transactional law firms. The startup was admitted to YC this year and is calling itself a “Cursor for lawyers”.
The founders, Henrik Hansson and Ludvig Swanström, worked together at the Swedish ecommerce tool startup Depict, cofounded by Anton Osika, the CEO of Lovable.
Founded: 2025
Funding: $500k from YC as part of the programme
Jon Kåre Stene, partner at Skyfall
Midio, Norway
Midio offers a visual-first, agentic platform for building, debugging and deploying AI-powered workflows and apps. It empowers developers and non-developers to create custom backend logic, integrations, document-processing agents and more through a drag-and-drop interface.
Founded: 2023
Funding: $660k from Sondo Capital in 2023
Nolla Health, Norway
Nolla develops AI-powered dermatology tools that integrate with clinician workflows to improve early detection and treatment outcomes. It uses vision transformation and large multimodal AI models trained on over 1m labelled cases across thousands of skin conditions, enabling automated image analysis, severity tracking and dynamic Q&A before clinical visits.
Founded: 2025
Funding: unknown
Handshake, Norway
Handshake is developing an AI agent that shops and pays for the customer, based on his or her preferences. It is starting with online shopping and everyday purchases — specifically, pizza, according to its website. It’s launching this month.
Founded: 2025
Funding: unknown
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/15-early-stage-ai-startups-to-watch-in-the-nordics/
