10 Scandinavian AI Lessons from 2024

What we learned about AI success from talking to AI startup founders and AI experts.

Author

Peter Juel Jensen
December 20, 2024

Pioneer AI: Checking the Nordic AI Pulse

Welcome to Pioneer AI’s newsletter, The Nordic AI Pulse. We are a Nordics-focused AI investment fund.

We track, share, and analyse information and insights on Nordic-related AI news, deals, and trends.

📚 In This Issue:

  1. 10 Scandinavian AI Lessons from 2024

  2. Nordic AI Funding News

  3. Podcast Insights

  4. Upcoming: Nordic AI Events You Shouldn't Miss

10 Scandinavian AI Lessons from 2024

Throughout 2024, we interviewed Scandinavian AI startup founders and AI experts. Here, we gather ten of the central lessons we learned from our conversations. The lessons apply not only to AI insiders but also to companies and professionals looking to use AI.  

Lesson #1: Know your vertical

Pioneer AI invested in Danish AI startup Alvenir in 2024. The company’s leadership team, mature technology, and huge market potential were three reasons for investing. We spoke with co-founder Martin Carsten Nielsen about the importance of understanding the inner workings of the industries you are targeting as your market:

“The question of precision and exact use cases needs to be answered, as does AI solutions' ability to meet future regulations and compliance requirements,” he said.

Lesson #2: Leverage AI for scalability and flexibility

Co-founder and CEO Anders Kallebo raised €5.4 million for Myrspoven through an equity funding round. The company’s solutions for optimising energy use in buildings leverage AI’s ability to provide scale and flexibility at unprecedented speed.

“In principle, similar solutions could be developed without AI, but they would have to be tailored to individual buildings,” he said.

Lesson #3: Consider the speed of AI

Jade Haayen and Aneja Orlić from Valcon have created a framework for evaluating how AI-ready companies are. We also covered how companies need to consider the speed of AI developments when planning for the future.

“GPTs were pretty terrible at most tasks just two years ago compared to today; this is a good indication of how fast things are developing,” they said.

Lesson #4: Finding AI expertise

Entrepreneur and lecturer Joachim Løw shared insights on how to hire AI experts at a time when they are in extremely high demand. He explained how his company mixes on-site with hiring specialists and freelancers who work remotely. His core advice for companies looking to hire AI experts in the current market:

“Tell a story that others want to be part of.”

Lesson #5: Look to your team for inspiration

Lean on your team’s expertise and input has been one of the core lessons for Tryp’s co-founder, Andre Rangel Sousa. The company’s successful seed round and rise to a €8.3 million valuation is partly down to a marketing intern:

“She suggested focusing more on social media marketing. Thanks to her input and guidance - and general excellence - we created a social media strategy that helped us go viral on TikTok,” he explained.

The company has now averaged more than a million users in the last 12 months while cutting customer acquisition costs to a fraction for its AI-powered travel platform. Needless to say, the intern is now a full-time member of staff.

Lesson #6: Do not (necessarily) think Scandinavian

The AI-powered learning platform Alice is only a year old but has already hired its A-Team and raised DKK 7.5 million. Co-founder Kim Rants explained that the company has set a lofty growth strategy, by looking to the US, a rather atypical approach for a Scandinavian startup:

“It is the biggest and deepest market for personal tutoring and learning […] where we will face the biggest competitors, so we’ll be prepared to allocate additional resources to establish our presence and compete,” he said.

Lesson #7: The power of localised AI

Erik David Johnson, Chief AI Officer at Delegate, spoke about the opportunities that local, Scandinavian AI models could lead to - and how they could increase control of sensitive data.

“For example, a government might want to create a policy Al or a model that interacts with citizens looking for specific information. Similar solutions could be developed for education or healthcare,” he said.

Lesson #8: What are the most important shoes to fill?

Responsibly uses AI to create sustainability insights at speed and at scale. The company closed a US$2.3 million seed round in 2023. Co-founder and CEO Thomas Buch Andersson shared how the company leverages AI both externally and internally to gain a competitive edge. He also spoke of how AI can change technical priorities for companies and startups - including those in the AI space:

“From the technical side, the most critical position is that of a full-stack engineer capable of rapidly iterating and developing solutions,” he said.

Lesson #9: Increasing AI buy-in

Maria Motzfeldt and the Danish pension company Velliv have undertaken an inspirational AI journey in the last year. One of the core strategies was making AI an exclusive experience and then expanding AI use throughout the company. She also spoke about the possibilities for AI startups in tightly regulated industries:

“For AI startups looking to collaborate with insurance companies or financial companies, the golden middle path is that solutions should offer close to plug-and-play deployment while also having the stringent data handling and protection setups needed for compliance,” she said.

Lesson #10: AI is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

Tailwind Biotech’s co-founder, Mirko Ceriani, sees endless AI opportunities at the moment.

“Anyone with AI software skills and a strong idea should get their hands dirty, take that chance, and try to go full-time on it,” he told us.

The conversation also covered how the company secured its first funding and developments in the AI + Biotech space.

What do you think? Any comments or thoughts? Let us know via email or contact us on the Pioneer AI LinkedIn page here. 

🚀AI Funding News🚀

Select Nordic AI-related deals, investments, acquisitions and insights. 

Congratulations to all of the founders and teams!

Pioneer AI’s top Nordic AI funding insights and highlights:

1: AI data connector technology gets huge backing
Neo4j, a leading graph database company, has secured a $50 million investment round. Its total capital raised is now $160 million, underscoring strong investor confidence in its technology and market position.

Neo4j's graph database technology enables organizations to efficiently model, store, and query data relationships in ways that support AI’s ability to access and leverage data. It holds a 44% market share in a space Gartner predicts will be used in 80% of data and analytics innovations in 2025. In other words, Neo4j is perfectly poised to become a global powerhouse in advanced data and AI connector solutions.

2: Robotics + AI scores another investment
T-Robotics, a partly Norwegian industrial robotics company, secured $5.4 million in seed funding. The funds will bolster the company's R&D efforts, with a focus on enhancing collaborative robot (cobot) and autonomous transport solutions, along with building out its international market presence.

T-Robotics has developed ActGPT, a robot-agnostic software platform that combines natural language and pre-trained AI models to simplify programming. The platform massively expands the possibilities for robots to take on new tasks and act more autonomously. AI + robotics has seen a score of Scandinavian deals in 2024 as the region’s technological robot innovation ecosystem continues to develop. We expect more similar deals in 2025.

🎧Listen To🎧

Nordic AI news and analysis for your ears.

  • AI Sweden Podcast [SE]- Examines AI’s crucial role in meeting healthcare challenges, such as an ageing population and resource shortages.

  • Teknologi og mennesker [NO] - Takes a look at the growing power of personal data in the age of AI and whether there is a need for a “data donor card.”

  • AI Denmark [DK] - Visits Universal Robots in Odense to look at how AI is used to help robots understand their surroundings better, even in dynamic environments.

📅Training, Meetups & Conferences📅

Conferences

  • January 7-9: Northern Lights Deep Learning 2025: Gathers researchers both on a national and international level to exchange ideas, encourage collaborations and present cutting-edge deep learning research. [Tromsø, Norway]

  • February 3-7: AI Week 2025: Massive conference with broad line-up and programme exploring AI’s impact and potential across industries, functions, and society. [Oslo, Norway]

  • February 25: Cybersecurity and AI: Cybersecurity conference focused on the impact of AI on cyber threats and defences. [Copenhagen, Denmark]

  • March 12: AI Marketing Conference: A conference filled with concrete strategies and implementable tips from leading experts in AI-driven marketing. [Copenhagen, Denmark]

  • March 17-20: IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence: Research conference focused on sharing research concepts and results and fostering an environment for future collaborations. [Tromsø, Norway]

  • March 19-20: OffDig 2025: A conference focused on digitisation, including the use of AI, in public organisations. [Aarhus, Denmark]

  • April 3: Applied AI Nordics 2025: Explore real-world case studies, results and learnings from the business implementation of AI across industries. [Copenhagen, Denmark]

  • April 11: Gothenburg AI Alliance Conference: One-day conference exploring various aspects of AI implementation. [Gothenburg, Sweden]

  • May 7-8: Data Innovation Summit: Large conference for exploring ways to accelerate AI-driven transformation throughout companies, industries and public organisations. [Stockholm, Sweden]

  • May 12-14: AI and Machine Learning for Healthcare: Research conference exploring advances in deep learning and neural networks for the development of intelligent healthcare systems. [Copenhagen, Denmark]

  • May 13-15: International Congress on Industrial AI and eMaintenance: Congress focused on industrial artificial intelligence, or IAI. [Luleå, Sweden]

  • May 14-15: Stockholm Tech Show: One of the Nordic region’s largest events and meeting places for professionals involved in new technologies, including AI. [Stockholm, Sweden]

  • May 15: Data Centres Denmark: Industry conference that includes looks at how AI is driving the exponential growth in the data centre industry. [Copenhagen, Denmark]

  • May 15-16: International Conference on AI and Soft Computing: Scientists, researchers, and research scholars come together to exchange and share experiences and research results regarding AI and soft computing. [Copenhagen, Denmark]

  • May 22: AI Compute Summit: Examines the future of AI computing, addressing the challenges of building scalable, sustainable systems. [Copenhagen, Denmark]

  • June 2-3: NORA Annual Conference: An annual event for the Norwegian AI research community where participants can interact and share research, ideas, and new perspectives. [Oslo, Norway]

  • June 11: Scandinavian Creative AI Summit: Newest in an event series designed to showcase how professionals in the creative industries embrace the power of generative AI. [Copenhagen, Denmark]

  • June 12-13: DevSum 2025: One of Sweden’s most prominent tech conferences, including many workshops and speakers focused on AI. [Stockhold, Sweden]

Meetups

Do you know of an event, meetup, or similar event that you think should be on the list? Let us know!

Got an AI story or insight from the Nordics? Share it with us!

Reply to this email or connect on LinkedIn.

Until next time,

Pioneer Venture AI,