Pioneer AI: Checking the Nordic AI Pulse.
Welcome to 2024’s 9th edition of The Nordic AI Pulse, the weekly newsletter from Pioneer AI, our Nordic-focused AI investment fund. Dive in for a roundup of AI news, deals, and insights covering the Nordic region.

📚 In This Issue:

1. How This Startup Raised €500,000

2. Nordic News Roundup

3. Cool Tools and Companies

4. Please “Steal” This Startup Idea

5. Nordic AI Funding News

6. Podcast Insights

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

Pioneer Insights

How This Startup Raised €500,000

Copenhagen-based Tryp.com has closed a seed round of €500,000, allowing it to scale and grow its unique, AI-powered travel planning platform. The funding brings Tryp.com to a €8.3 million valuation.

We spoke to the company’s co-founder, Andre Rangel Sousa, about the journey towards funding and his approach to entrepreneurship and running a successful company.

Your team is very international. What is the background for founding Tryp.com?

Andre: I'm originally from Lisbon, Portugal, with an educational background in mechanical engineering, focusing on robotics. I came to Denmark on the Erasmus programme for a Master's in Odense, a robotics hub.

While studying, my then-girlfriend, now wife, and I travelled around Asia. Planning each stage of the trip and finding an optimal route and price was a pain I think many can recognise. I've long been interested in chess, and it got me thinking about how AI can evaluate multiple positions and navigate webs of options and opportunities. This laid the ground for founding Tryp.com.

What does your AI do in this context?

Andre: In short, it optimises 70 million transport options between 7000 locations across the globe for you – so you don't have to. The AI aims to make the users happy, so it tries to find the best possible trip for each user. It gets better and better at this the more you use it.

What were your early steps in going from idea to company?

Andre: I guess the first step was entering and winning a startup competition. This was based on an MVP. I have some brilliant engineering friends. After the win, I convinced five of them – three from Portugal and two from Denmark – to form the company.

We initially thought getting the travel data we needed from different sites would be pretty straightforward, but it was a significant challenge. We needed multiple APIs to data sources for flight pricing to build our AI engine. In the end, we bootstrapped for about a year and a half before we were ready with the prototype.

That was when we were ready to take the following steps and fully launch the business as a full-time job.

Your next steps are some of the most critical in a startup’s journey, such as getting the first customers onboard and creating investor interest. What are some of your memories of those days?

Andre: It was an exciting time. One thing we learned early on was that you have to speak the language of your audience.

We applied for grants to cover costs and received support through the SDU accelerator. By 2021, we had raised around €250.000. We have a bit of a Silicon Valley mindset, so we decided to put the pedal to the metal and invest quite heavily in customer acquisition. We were successful, but the customer acquisition costs were unsustainable. We spent over €8000 a month in marketing and simultaneously had growing expenses for scaling the tech stack.

That’s when our marketing intern 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. We have had more than a million users in the last 12 months while cutting customer acquisition costs to a fraction. Needless to say, the intern is now a full-time member of staff.

As an AI founder, what have you learned about running and growing a company during your journey?

Andre: Don't raise funds to hire; start with getting your team together. Only raise once you have done the most you possibly can without. If you’re a businessperson, get out and talk to AI engineering students. Your core team is going to be a lot of engineers.

Secondly, find and encourage dedicated people. Too many startup founders are overly greedy regarding equity, I feel. Instead, create a robust vesting scheme that requires your team to be committed and believe in your idea. So, for example, you might have a clause that says that if you leave even after two years, you don’t get anything.

My “bad” or “contrary” advice is that I don’t think you should be protectionist about your tech or solution. If you need to protect it so much, it's probably because your business moat isn't strong. Also, if you believe enough in your idea, consumer testing can be overrated. Instead, go for it and focus on building the product instead.

Has your position in Denmark helped or hindered your startup journey?

Andre: Being from Portugal, I would jokingly say that one of the good things is that the weather is always so bad that it encourages you to stay inside and work.

Another benefit is your flat hierarchy and a mindset of open discussions.

There are good incentives for startups in Denmark that work well, such as the innovation fund.

We would love to hear your thoughts on Tryp’s approach and Andre’s views on entrepreneurship and being a startup. Let us know via email or contact us on the Pioneer AI LinkedIn page here. 

🎙Nordic News Roundup

• Expert group recommends Sweden puts the AI pedal to the metal - if not, the country will be left behind. [SE] (GP)

• Olso school says yes to AI focus, raising the point that children are likely to be exposed to AI no matter what. [NO] (Vart Oslo)

• Teachers are increasingly integrating ChatGPT and other AI systems as work assistants. [DK] (Folkeskolen)

• AI is “revolutionising the law business,” says a leading lawyer. [SE] (Dagens Juridik)

• One thousand two hundred hectares of weeds are about to take on an AI-powered robot from Akson Robotics. [DK] (Landbrugsavisen) (Paywall)

• An AI assistant is saving this company US$40 million a year. [NO] (Computer World)

• EVs and renewables are challenging the energy grid - but this AI algorithm looks set to solve the challenges. [SE] (Via TT)

• Experts are ready with recommendations for regulating AI, but Danish politicians want regulation to happen at the EU level. [DK] (TV2)

• This startup wants to help banks and telecoms identify cybercriminals by using AI. [SE] (TN)

• New Norwegian rules aimed at AI in education. [NO] (Framtida)

🛠️ Cool Tools & Companies

• KARL from Denmark develops an AI-powered decision platform that empowers farmers to make informed decisions, optimise planning and boost yields.

• DAZOQ from Sweden offers an AI-powered cloud-based digital management system for industrial managers.

• Valohai from Finland develops a MLOps platform designed for ML pioneers.

  Do you know cool tools or companies I should feature in the newsletter? Let me know!

💵Please “Steal” This Startup Idea

We would love to see someone build the following (and if you do, we might invest in you):

Introducing "DataCompass AI," an AI-driven enterprise search platform. The platform revolutionises how business users interact with internal documents, offering a unique blend of advanced search, text analysis, and compliance features. NLP and ML technologies enable in-depth text analysis, data protection and the ability for users to interact seamlessly with the systems.

🚀AI Funding News

Select Nordic AI companies that have raised funds in recent months:

• Subsets from Denmark

• Bionamic from Sweden

• BeCause from Denmark

• Hakio from Denmark

• Portchain from Denmark

• Xensam from Sweden

• Go Autonomous from Denmark

• Myrspoven from Sweden

• Ekobot from Sweden

• Saga Robotics from Norway

Congratulations to all of the founders and teams!

Pioneer AI top 3 deal and funding highlights and insights: 

1: Subsets is backed by Y Combinator. Sam Altman’s old company is backing the Danish company’s solution, which enables “commercial teams to run AI-driven retention experiments without engineering support.” Think very, very advanced A/B testing that circumnavigates one of the biggest roadblocks for AI deployment today: a lack of technical experts.

2: Bionamic raised €350k. It is yet another deal in the fertile healthcare + AI ecosystem flourishing in the Nordic countries. Bionamic’s AI and data-driven solutions for biopharma teams will likely add extra innovation rocket power to other startups in the field.

3: €5,400,000. According to Crunchbase data, Myrspoven takes first place for the biggest Nordic funding round in February. We hope to speak to the team in a coming newsletter, so stay tuned for that.

Are there other Nordic companies that should be on this list? Let me know!

🎧 Listen To

• Prompt [DK] - looks at how AI is going to be used in Danish schools.

• AI Sweden Postcast [SE]- checks in on the status of Sweden’s MyAI open platform.

• MetaDAMA - Norwegian podcast episode examines the opportunities and challenges the EU AI Act presents to companies.

📅 Training, Meetups & Conferences

Conferences

• 14 March (2024): Applied AI Nordics: Make AI practical and understandable and inspire how to get value from AI in business. [Copenhagen, Denmark]

• 14 March (2024): AI-Con 2024: AI in the context of content and marketing. [Oslo, Norway]

• 17-18 April (2024): AI+: Get the latest updates from the world of artificial intelligence. [Halden, Norway]

• 24-25 April (2024): Data Innovation Summit: One of the most influential Nordic events on data, analytics and AI. [Stockholm, Sweden]

• 25 April: Applied AI Nordics: Leading Nordic AI conference. This year’s subject is how to move from opportunistic to strategic AI. [Copenhagen, Denmark]

• April 27-28: SAIM 2024: Conference for sharing knowledge and results in theory, methodology and applications of Artificial Intelligence, Soft Computing, and Machine Learning. [Copenhagen, Denmark]

• May 15-17: DevSum 20: International conference exploring the latest trends and technologies within development. [Stockholm, Sweden]

• May 24-26: ICMLT 9: The Ninth International Conference on Machine Learning Technologies is a forum for exchanges on current challenges in the machine learning field. [Oslo, Norway]

• June 10-11: SCAI Symposium 2024: The 14th Scandinavian conference on AI (SCAI) that brings together AI researchers and practitioners to present and discuss ongoing AI work and future trends. [Jonkøping, Sweden]

• June 10-14: HHAI 2024: The third international Hybrid Human Artificial Intelligence conference exploring AI systems that cooperate synergistically, proactively, and purposefully with humans. [Malmø, Sweden]

• July 18-19: ICAIAE 2024: Scientific conference for exchanging and sharing experiences and results of using AI for education. [Copenhagen, Denmark]

• August 20-23: Robophilosophy Conference 2024: Social robots with AI: prospects, risks, and responsible methods. [Aarhus, Denmark]

• October 14-18: Process Mining Conference 2024: Industry and scientific conference on process mining. [Copenhagen, Denmark]

• October 21-22: Nordic AI Meet: Symposium early-career AI researchers to network, collaborate, exchange ideas, and form a Nordic approach to building AI solutions for the societal good. [Helsinki, Finland]

• October 21-23: D3A: The Danish Digitalization, Data Science and AI brings together a diverse audience to explore the latest trends and research in AI. [Nyborg, Denmark]

Meetups

• AI Copenhagen

• Aarhus AI

• Stockholm AI

• AI Community of Sweden

• AI Engineering Sweden 

• Oslo AI

• Oslo Generative AI Meetup

• Oslo AI Product Lab

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

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

Reply to this email or connect on LinkedIn.

Until next time,

Pioneer Venture AI,