Reykjavík-founded HR technology company 50skills has raised $6 million in a funding round co-led by Frumtak Ventures, Swiss Post Ventures, Avant and US family office DRD Investments. The company develops an operating system for people workflows that combines automated processes, AI agents and human oversight, allowing HR teams to build and manage processes such as onboarding, contracts, employee requests, approvals and background checks across their existing systems. It offers two products, Hire, an applicant tracking system, and Journeys, an AI-powered platform for building and running people processes. 50skills will use the new funding to expand its sales, marketing and community teams while continuing to invest in its platform and AI agent capabilities as it grows its customer base across the Nordics and the UK.
50skills is building the infrastructure for people and AI agents to run processes together. The company was co-founded by CEO Kristján Freyr Kristjánsson, who founded Iceland’s first startup accelerator (Startup Reykjavik), previously served as CEO of business accelerator Icelandic Startups, and ex-VP at digital banking platform Meniga.
Founded in Iceland, 50skills works with many of the country’s largest employers and best-known brands, including Icelandair, Eimskip, Blue Lagoon, Domino’s, and Securitas, and public-sector bodies such as the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the City of Reykjavík, alongside a growing base of customers across the Nordics and the UK.
50skills co-founder and CEO, Kristján Freyr Kristjánsson: “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.”
Millions of actions have run on the platform: onboarding tasks, contracts and signatures, employee requests and approvals, background checks, equipment and access, and the coordination that used to pull HR teams away from their people. 50skills users have already reported:
The platform is already being used by organisations across a range of industries to automate HR processes. Icelandair has digitised more than 20 HR workflows and eliminated the equivalent of four to five months of annual HR administration, while the platform reviews more than 3,000 health-grant receipts each year against company policy. Air Atlanta saves 50 hours a week through automated visa processing, while Íslandshótel has reduced the time spent processing employee benefit applications by 80% across its 18 hotels, with some cases now taking as little as five minutes.
Meanwhile, Samskip has unified HR workflows across four companies, connecting more than 150 onboarding actions to its core systems. The company points to a broader challenge facing HR teams: Deloitte research has found that HR departments can spend up to 57% of their time on administrative and routine tasks, while the Society for Human Resource Management’s State of AI in HR 2026 found that 67% of respondents lacked awareness of AI’s capabilities and 38% cited a lack of resources as a barrier to adoption.
Avant co-founder Jon Jonsson: “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.”
50skills brings those processes into a single platform. HR teams describe the process they want and the platform turns that into an operational workflow connected to the systems the organisation already runs on. From there, automation handles the predictable work, AI agents handle tasks requiring interpretation, and people remain in control of decisions that require human judgment.
In practice, that means AI that is practical for HR teams, workflows go live in days rather than months, fewer errors, faster turnaround and a better experience for employees.
Frumtak Ventures Partner and Chair of the 50skills board, Ásthildur Otharsdóttir: “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.”
Read the orginal article: https://arcticstartup.com/50skills-raises-6-million/
