50skills raises $6M for AI agents that build their own agents to run HR
Tech Funding News Sofia Chesnokova ● Covered by 5 sources
Iceland’s 50skills just raised $6M for AI that builds HR workflows and extra agents. It’s betting on automation that still needs human oversight.
Based on reporting by Tech Funding News, Sofia Chesnokova — read the original for the full story.
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Icelandic HR automation startup 50skills has picked up $6 million in new funding, and the odd thing is that the company is not really selling “an AI operating system” so much as a system that turns plain-language instructions into working HR processes. A customer describes the workflow they want, and the platform sets it up. Then it can spawn more agents to do the grunt work, from screening candidates to sending policy alerts and drafting onboarding emails.
That approach traces back to founder Kristján Freyr Kristjánsson’s time at Meniga, the Icelandic fintech company where he kept running into the same problem: separate systems that did not talk to each other cleanly, and workflows that looked right on paper but fell apart in practice. He says that pushed him to build something that could help design processes and test them in real use. The company now says it uses a number of AI models to do that job.
The new round was led by Frumtak Ventures, Swiss Post Ventures, Avant, and DRD Investments. It follows a $2.6 million seed round from Frumtak Ventures in May 2022. Kristjánsson says 50skills did not go back to investors for nearly three years because the business was doing well enough and running efficiently. Usage finally changed the calculus.
Last year, customers automated more than one million actions. This year, they have already reached six million in just a couple of months. That kind of jump explains the hiring plan: the team of about 20 people, spread across Iceland, Stockholm and the UK, is hiring in Stockholm, Iceland and for remote roles, and is also eyeing the US and Benelux. The company has not started hiring there yet.
50skills is pitching itself as a safer kind of AI bet, with Kristjánsson stressing responsible use and human oversight. That is the right instinct, because HR is exactly where a flashy demo can turn into a compliance headache. The market is crowded, too, with names like Personio, Rippling and HiBob already sitting on far bigger numbers.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
The sensible story here is not “AI for HR,” it’s “workflow plumbing finally got an interface people can describe out loud.” That’s useful, and a lot less magical than the pitch sounds, which is usually a good sign. The real test is whether the company keeps the humans in the loop when the software starts feeling too proud of itself.
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