Icelandic HR Startup 50skills Raises $6M to Revolutionize Workflows

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-24

Ever feel like your HR team is drowning in emails, spreadsheets, and a dozen different systems that just don't talk to each other? You're not alone. And that's exactly the problem a Reykjavík-based startup called 50skills is trying to solve. They just raised €5.3 million (about $6 million) to double down on their mission: making people workflows actually work. ### The Funding Round: Who's Betting Big on 50skills? The round was co-led by Frumtak Ventures, Swiss Post Ventures, Avant, and American family office DRD Investments. That's a pretty diverse group of backers, which says something about the universal pain point 50skills is addressing. Ásthildur Otharsdóttir, Partner at Frumtak Ventures and Chair of the 50skills board, put it this way: "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." She added that 50skills has the product, domain expertise, and customer traction to lead that shift. ### What Exactly Does 50skills Do? Founded in 2017, 50skills is building what they call the operating system for people workflows. In plain English: it helps HR teams design and run the employee experience across all the systems a company already uses. The platform combines deterministic workflows (where a process runs the same way every time), AI agents (that handle tasks needing interpretation), and human oversight (because some decisions just need a human touch). All of that comes with the governance and security that HR and people operations require. According to the company, HR teams manage hundreds of recurring processes, but many still depend on email, spreadsheets, and manual coordination across systems that were never designed to work together. 50skills brings those processes into a single platform. HR teams describe the process they want, and the platform turns it into an operational workflow connected to the systems the organisation already runs on. From there, automation handles predictable work, AI agents handle tasks requiring interpretation, and people remain in control of decisions requiring human judgment. ### A Balancing Act: Deterministic vs. Probabilistic Co-founder and CEO Kristján Freyr Kristjánsson explained the challenge: "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." ### Two Products, One Mission The company offers two main products: - **Hire**: An applicant tracking system that streamlines recruitment. - **Journeys**: An AI-powered platform for building and running people processes. HR teams describe a process in plain language; the platform builds it, runs it, and keeps a complete record of every step. ### Traction and Notable Clients 50skills says its platform has been used to complete over 4 million actions in the past 12 months by HR teams in the Nordics and the UK. Notable clients include Icelandair, Eimskip, Blue Lagoon, Domino's, and Securitas, as well as public-sector bodies such as the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the City of Reykjavík. That's a pretty impressive list for a startup from Iceland. ### What's Next? With this fresh funding, 50skills plans to accelerate hiring in sales, marketing, and community, while continuing to invest in the platform, including those AI agents that work alongside HR teams. If you're in HR and feeling the pain of disconnected systems, 50skills might just be your new best friend. And for the rest of us, it's a sign that the future of work is being built right now—one workflow at a time.