Oslo’s tech trajectory has never followed the expected path. Its startup scene was born and began to thrive when social need met commercial opportunity, and just as with robotics and automation, the ecosystem’s mindset continues to be, “if there’s a capability gap, why not fill it?”
The Norwegian capital’s approach to innovation has continued to veer the country away from its former pigeonholes of maritime and oil and gas success towards, well, whatever’s needed. No standout target sector; no clear lineage when it comes to the passing down of knowledge, experience and success.
Ingenuity is the constant; the application is up for grabs.
From more obvious use cases in finance and education, to more novel territory across areas of agriculture, leisure, food and drink, and even law, the Oslo tech startup scene’s strength continues to be its breadth.
It’s a makeup that is now propelling the city from being an intriguing artificial intelligence (AI) innovator, to the cusp of being an AI trailblazer.
“I’d say that Norway is now on par with the broader global market in respect to AI innovation and application,” says Michael Farrand, chief commercial officer at Völur. “I think it comes from often targeting industries that have historically been laggards when it comes to technology or innovation. We realise that these industries still create significant data. It then just requires focus and investment to effectively use it.
“Norway isn’t necessarily unique in that respect, but the Oslo ecosystem is certainly adept at getting these companies in novel areas off the ground and marketable.”
Why not AI?
Völur was founded in 2019 as an AI software company that epitomises this evolving Norwegian tech stereotype. At its core, it’s a tech company built by 20 people bringing a lot of innovation and ideas to the table. Among those 20, however, also includes experts from the meat production industry. Five countries and three continents later, Völur is now a global leader in a space that didn’t immediately scream AI intervention.
Farrand counters: “Why not AI? I’d suggest there are sectors out there with less of a need for it than the meat industry.
“As opposed to assembly-type processes like building a car – where you have all of the parts required to make the end product and know what the end result will look like – animal disassembly deals with highly variable raw material input,” he says. “This makes decision-making extremely difficult in the planning process. Operators, therefore, do not have a clear idea of what the output will be. Most decisions are made in real time with the best information available.”
Völur’s AI can model expected weights, yield and grades of animals before automatically recommending plans that account for expected demand and optimal sales strategies, staffing requirements, and resource investments.
“Völur is unique in the meat processing space in that our nearly 100 years of team industry experience has developed an AI solution with the problem in mind,” says Farrand. “Most other AI companies begin with an AI solution and then work to apply it to the specific industry. Völur is recognised for being on the leading edge of purpose-built solutions for an industry that was in need and largely untouched by AI when we started.”
Niche-finding acumen
Völur is based in Oslo Science Park at the Start-Up Lab. Surrounded by cutting-edge early-stage companies looking to tap into a number of different industry opportunities, the ecosystem has been built for variety of experience, scale and – critically, when it comes to AI – application.
With strong support from Innovation Norway further fostering such a diverse landscape, it should perhaps come as no surprise that one company using AI to create a step change in food processing might exist in touching distance of – and benefitting from the same support and network as – a startup digitising tennis coaching.
“SportAI is a sports technology company using AI to offer advanced technique analysis, detailed match statistics, tactical insights and highlight videos using computer vision and machine learning,” says Lauren Pedersen, the company’s co-founder and CEO.
“Previously, video analysis required manual tagging by coaches, which limited scalability, and was affordable only by professional players with access to performance analysts,” she says. “However, as mounted court cameras, broadcast feeds and mobile phone video recording has become the norm at sports facilities, SportAI is capitalising on the demand for high-quality analysis.”
Last year, SportAI closed a $3m funding round with participation from Norwegian investment fund Altitude Capital, global tennis star Casper Ruud, and Endre Holen, former head of McKinsey’s Global Tech and Media sector. Just two years after its inception, its global evolution reflects not just digital capability, but niche-finding acumen.
Pedersen adds: “SportAI Open is built specifically for sport. Unlike generic AI assistants, it combines sport-aware language models with our own deterministic sports APIs [application programming interfaces], including technique and match analysis engines. Responses are grounded using continuously trained, sport-specific vector databases and enhanced with visual overlays directly on uploaded videos to explain technique, movement and tactical patterns clearly. Our server-side protocols ensure the right contextual data is retrieved consistently, delivering accurate and explainable insights.”
Where next?
It doesn’t require an extensive deep dive to find more novel examples thriving in Oslo’s ecosystem when it comes to AI. Since 2019, Strise has become a go-to product both domestically and internationally as an anti-money laundering tool.
“Customers use Strise to shorten onboarding, reduce false positives and surface hidden ownership risk earlier,” says co-founder and CEO Marit Rødevand. “Our first exposure to AI came through entity resolution and pattern detection. Identifying real-world entities across messy, incomplete data requires probabilistic models rather than rules.
“We began building Strise around this insight early,” she says. “AI was not an add-on. It was required to make sense of ownership structures, indirect control and ongoing risk changes.”
Fast-forward to 2023, and Strise had closed a $10.8m Series A funding round led by Atomico, with participation from Maki.vc, Curiosity and others to support European expansion beyond the Nordics, including a London office.
For companies like Strise, SportAI and Völur, ingenuity and innovation remain the constant, making AI an obvious capability to leverage, optimise and make successful on an international scale.
The Oslo ecosystem, support and mindset, however, means there’s no telling where that innovative AI might be pointed to next.
