🇮🇸 50skills raises $6 million as demand grows for AI operating system for people workflows

September 24, 2026

50skills, the AI operating system for people workflows, has raised a $6 million funding round co-led by Frumtak Ventures, Swiss Post Ventures, Avant, and American family office DRD Investments. The funding will accelerate hiring across sales, marketing and community, alongside continued investment in the platform, including the AI agents that work alongside HR teams.

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.

Customer impact

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. Users have reported significant time and efficiency gains. Icelandair has digitised 20+ HR workflows and eliminated 4–5 months’ worth of HR admin on an annual basis, reviewing 3,000+ health-grant receipts annually against company policy. Air Atlanta saves 50 hours a week through visa-processing automation on a single process. Íslandshótel cut the time spent processing employee benefit applications by 80% across 18 hotels, with cases that once took hours now taking as little as five minutes, some with no manual HR work at all. Samskip unified HR workflows across four companies, with over 150 onboarding actions connected to core systems.

The problem and solution

Research from Deloitte found that HR departments can spend up to 57% of their time on administrative and routine tasks. Meanwhile, the Society for Human Resource Management’s State of AI in HR 2026 revealed that 67% of respondents lacked awareness of AI’s capabilities, while 38% cited a lack of resources as a barrier to adoption. 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 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.

“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,” said Kristján Freyr Kristjánsson, co-founder and CEO.

About 50skills

50skills is building the operating system for people workflows. HR teams use it to design and run the experience of their own employees across the organisation’s existing systems, combining deterministic workflows, AI agents and human oversight with the governance and security that HR and people operations require. The company offers two products: Hire, an applicant tracking system, and Journeys, the AI-powered platform for building and running people processes. 50skills is headquartered in Reykjavík, Iceland, with an office in Stockholm.

Contact

For more information, visit 50skills.

Originally published on September 24,  2026 by 50skills.