50skills Raises $6M For AI Agents That Build Their Own Agents To Run HR
50skills team
Image credit: 50skills
50skills, an Icelandic HR technology company, has raised 6 million dollars to scale a platform that goes beyond typical workflow automation by having AI agents generate further, more specialised agents on the fly to carry out the individual tasks inside a given HR process.
The round was co‑led by Frumtak Ventures, Swiss Post Ventures, Avant and US family office DRD Investments. Founded in 2017 by chief executive Kristjan Freyr Kristjansson, the company traces its origins to a frustration he encountered directly while working at Icelandic fintech company Meniga, where he struggled to connect various internal systems and build workflows that actually functioned the way they were supposed to. That experience, needing both to design a process and to see how it actually behaved once running, pushed him toward building 50skills rather than continuing to work around the same limitation inside someone else's systems.
The problem 50skills is built around is a familiar one across HR departments of almost any size. HR teams manage hundreds of recurring processes, spanning onboarding, background checks, contract management, employee requests and equipment provisioning, yet many of those processes still depend on email threads, spreadsheets and manual coordination across systems that were never designed to talk to each other. Kristjansson has framed the balance the company is trying to strike as the actual core of the job for HR and people operators, combining deterministic workflows that need to run exactly the same way every time, probabilistic agents for steps that require interpretation rather than fixed rules, and human oversight, governance and security running through all of it, arguing that getting that balance right is not optional for the category but is instead the entire point of the product.
What distinguishes 50skills from a more conventional workflow automation tool is how directly it puts natural language at the centre of building new processes. Rather than requiring an HR team to configure a workflow through a rules engine or drag‑and‑drop builder, customers can describe the process they want in plain language, after which an agent constructs the corresponding workflow directly. From there, the system generates additional, more specialised agents to handle specific tasks inside that workflow, such as screening incoming candidates, sending policy alerts when a compliance deadline approaches, or drafting onboarding emails tailored to a new hire's role. Kristjansson has described the underlying goal as helping a user provide enough context about their own business and processes that an agent can genuinely assist in building and streamlining those areas itself, rather than simply executing a fixed template a vendor built in advance, and the platform draws on a number of different underlying AI models to do that work rather than relying on a single one.
The company already works with a customer base that spans well beyond its home market, including Icelandair, shipping company Eimskip, Blue Lagoon, Domino's and Securitas, alongside public sector organisations such as Iceland's Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the City of Reykjavík. Customer feedback shared by the company points to concrete operational gains from that deployment, with recruitment and AI firm Wortell reporting a nearly 40 percent cut in time‑to‑hire and more than 200 hours a year freed up for recruiters to spend on candidate experience rather than data entry after rolling out 50skills across its Benelux operations, while FESTI's HR systems solution manager has credited the platform with transforming a complex employee stock option process into a seamless operation that saved the company more than 200 hours.
Ásthildur Otharsdóttir, partner at Frumtak Ventures and chair of 50skills's board, has framed the investment around the company's accumulated product maturity rather than a purely speculative AI bet, arguing that 50skills has turned years of customer feedback into a platform organisations already run their people operations on every day, and that as AI reshapes how work gets done, the companies that win in this category will be the ones able to bring people, workflows and AI agents together safely and effectively at the same time. She pointed to 50skills's existing product, domain expertise and customer traction as the basis for backing the company to lead that broader shift within HR technology specifically, rather than backing a newer, less proven entrant chasing the same opportunity.
The new funding will go toward expanding 50skills's sales, marketing and community teams, continuing investment in the core platform, and building out further AI agents designed to work alongside human HR teams rather than in place of them. The company's current 20‑person team is expected to grow further, with hiring planned specifically across the Nordics, and the company is weighing entry into the US and Benelux markets as it looks to extend its customer base well beyond its existing Nordic and UK footprint.
50skills enters an HR technology market that already includes considerably larger, well‑capitalised players building their own AI capabilities into established platforms, including Personio, valued at 8.5 billion dollars, Rippling, valued at 16.8 billion dollars, and HiBob, which has raised more than 565 million dollars to date. Against that competitive backdrop, 50skills's specific bet is that plain‑language, agent‑generating workflow creation gives HR teams a materially faster and more flexible way to build and adjust their own processes than the more rigid, pre‑configured automation typically offered by larger incumbent platforms. Whether that flexibility proves durable as those larger competitors accelerate their own AI feature rollouts, rather than remaining a meaningful differentiator only while 50skills is one of the few vendors offering it, will likely shape how much of the broader HR automation market the company is able to capture as it pushes into new geographies over the coming year.
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