Shifter is an independent news site about Norwegian tech startups in the new economy. We cover big and small events in the startup industry while reporting on innovation in bigger companies. We focus on ideas, challenges, money, power, people and good stories from everywhere.

1. Short description RoboConnect is developing an independent, AI-supported platform that helps industrial companies turn tacit and fragmented process knowledge into a clear, decision-relevant automation case — before supplier dialogue begins. 2. The problem Many industrial companies know they need to automate, but struggle to define what should be automated, what is causing the problem and whether the process is ready for investment. The people closest to production often understand the process well, but this knowledge may be spread across operators, engineers and management, poorly documented or mixed with assumptions and missing data. The customer may therefore approach the market with an unclear problem description and incomplete information. System integrators then have to reconstruct the customer’s process understanding and collect missing data before a meaningful solution dialogue can begin. This creates uncertainty, longer clarification phases, weak or difficult-to-compare proposals and projects that stall early. The core problem is not a lack of technology or suppliers. It is that the knowledge needed to make a good early automation decision is often tacit, fragmented and difficult to transfer. 3. The solution RoboConnect starts by understanding the customer’s process, challenges and actual needs. The RoboConnect AI Advisor conducts a guided professional conversation that helps the company describe how production works today, what it wants to improve, which constraints matter and what information is still missing. The AI Advisor brings together information from different parts of the organisation, separates facts from assumptions and uncertainty, identifies knowledge gaps and risks, and turns unclear issues into practical next actions. The result is a shared and structured automation basis that can be developed into a supplier-ready project brief. Relevant projects can then be connected with suitable system integrators, technology suppliers and R&D environments. This gives the customer greater decision confidence and solution providers a better starting point. RoboConnect is not building a generic chatbot. The platform combines a domain-specific workflow, structured project data and knowledge from industrial cases, expert interviews and feedback from customers and automation partners. Over time, this strengthens clarification, project maturation and matching. The first focused area is welding automation and high-mix, low-volume manufacturing. The longer-term ambition is to expand across other automation categories and build a Nordic platform for early-stage automation clarification and matching. 4. Business model and commercial opportunity RoboConnect creates value on both sides of the market. Industrial companies receive a clearer and safer starting point, while automation partners gain access to better-qualified customer opportunities. The current model is based mainly on supplier-side revenue through fees for qualified matches and successful projects. Future revenue streams may include paid AI-assisted readiness reports, supplier subscriptions, premium access and category-specific products. The model is now being validated through pilots and early customer projects. Norway is the validation market, with Sweden as the first intended scale-up market. 5. Why I started RoboConnect The motivation came from repeated conversations with industrial companies, automation experts and system integrators. I saw that many projects became uncertain long before technology was selected. Companies needed a more independent and structured way to understand their own situation before entering a supplier-led process. With a background in research, data analysis and complex problem structuring, combined with further training in programming, databases and AI, I founded RoboConnect to bridge the gap between industrial process knowledge and automation delivery.

Proptly was founded in 2021 by Kristoffer Gjerde, Gunnar Windsand Sem, and Thomas Kristiansen, with a bold vision to transform the often-overlooked, yet critical, part of the climate tech ecosystem: installations. What started as a casual conversation over Christmas drinks about the headaches of managing contractors, quickly turned into a mission to streamline the installation process for climate tech solutions across Europe. We recognized that while there’s no shortage of companies innovating in the climate tech space—producing world-class EV chargers, heat pumps, and solar panels—the bottleneck often lies in getting these technologies deployed quickly and efficiently. That’s where Proptly comes in. We’ve built a B2B marketplace that connects climate tech companies with a network of skilled, vetted installers, making sure that cutting-edge green technologies reach consumers without the typical delays and frustrations. Think of it like Uber for installations: companies get real-time data on installer performance, response times, and customer satisfaction, allowing them to scale their operations with ease. Revolutionizing the Installation Process Our platform tackles a glaring inefficiency in the market—the installation bottleneck—by ensuring that the best installers, backed by proven performance metrics, are always available to deploy climate tech solutions. For climate tech companies, we’re solving a massive headache: ensuring their innovations get installed, not just built. For contractors, we’re providing consistent job opportunities, helping them grow their businesses in a fast-expanding green economy. With $4 million in seed funding, high-profile partnerships including Easee, Sungrow, and Coop, and a stellar team of industry veterans from companies like Kahoot, Oda, McKinsey, EY, Tesla, and Easee, we’re setting the standard for how climate tech installations should be done. Our Vision Proptly aims to become the leading B2B marketplace for order-to-installation processes across Europe and beyond. With climate tech adoption on the rise, we aim to play a crucial role in accelerating the deployment of these technologies, helping the world transition to a greener future more efficiently. We’re not just about getting the job done; we’re about getting it done right—with transparency, speed, and customer satisfaction at the heart of everything we do.

Insj is a student organization startup that consults and coach student with entrepreneurial ideas. We have experienced coaches that guide students with an idea through the process of making a business, NGO or organization. In short: - we coach students with ideas. - we create technical and inspirational events to teach and inspire entrepreneurship. - we connect students, investors, and business. - We give practical work experience in a learn by doing environment for our student associates.

Inkubator ås is the Startup incubator at Campus Ås outside Oslo. We help startups both on and off campus to get of the ground. We operate purely as an adivsor to the management team startup. We do not take equity or board positions.Inkubator Ås is a Siva Incubator. The owners are Siva, NMBU. NIBIO and Kjeller Innovasjon

Ode is building the world’s simplest solution for therapeutic music. We combine a smart speaker with a single-knob interface and AI-driven curation to reduce anxiety, agitation, and depression in people living with dementia. Founded after CEO Guttorm saw music’s impact through his grandmother’s dementia, Ode exists to remove the time, technology, and cost barriers that keep personalised music out of everyday care. Today, getting it right typically means specialist mapping, hours of playlist work, and daily device hassle, which caregivers and families can’t sustain. Ode makes it practical: curate in minutes, then play instantly with one knob—so the right music is there when it’s needed, without adding workload.

GitHub made it easy for the world to build software together. SomebodyMakeIt does the same for physical products. SomebodyMakeIt is where brands, IP owners, and product creators can turn ideas into real products without building supply chains from scratch through a shared infrastructure for sourcing, collaboration, production, and scaling. Physical product creation is still absurdly broken. If you want to launch something real, you usually need to find the right people, manage scattered files and feedback, coordinate suppliers, handle production risk, and commit money before you know if demand exists. That kills speed, margins, and momentum. It also locks out a huge number of creators and companies that could launch great products if the system were easier. This is a massive market gap hiding in plain sight. We are building the platform where physical products get built. A place where ideas, briefs, collaborators, makers, manufacturers, production knowledge, and execution can live in one system. Instead of every company rebuilding the process from zero, they can plug into shared infrastructure for developing, testing, and scaling products. The more projects that run through the platform, the stronger the network becomes. More data, better matching, faster execution, more repeat production, and more value captured across the lifecycle. We started this because we think it is crazy that software has world class infrastructure for building together, while physical products are still stuck in email, spreadsheets, fragmented sourcing, and expensive guesswork. That should not be true anymore. We are building SomebodyMakeIt because the company that becomes the default place where physical products get built can become incredibly important.

Norway's first VR experience center with latest technologies and exclusive games. Award-winning concept with TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence. The center is located in Oslo center and offers events for up to 50 people. Our packages include access to lounge zone with PlayStation and party rooms. Immersive and unique experiences for private and corporate clients.

NODES is the independent marketplace for a sustainable energy future where grid owners, producers, and consumers of energy can trade decentralized flexibility and energy. NODES, as an independent market operator, is addressing key trends and challenges in the energy system such as increased share of renewable power production, decentralized generation, and the rapid change of customer behavior. NODES vision is to build Europe’s most customer-centric, integrated energy marketplace to unlock the value of local flexible power resources and support the drive to a sustainable, emission-free future. NODES mission is to facilitate the optimal use of flexibility in the grid by offering an open, integrated marketplace to all flexibility providers and grid operators.

Horde is an intelligent personal economy app empowering thousands of consumers to manage their daily finances through actionable insights and innovative alternatives to traditional financial services. Our mission is to challenge an outdated and overpriced business by creating simple, intuitive, transparent solutions that give people greater financial freedom. Our focus is always on the consumer and we have a strong sense of social responsibility.

Orgbrain is a next generation portal that is tailor-made for manage digital board meetings and general assembly. The portal gives you everything you need to organize a meeting like meeting planing, video conferencing, shareholder book, digital voting, document storage, distribution of minutes for consultation and signing of minutes with BankID. The system provides proposals for both annual plan, agenda and minutes. Orgbrain also contains a digital board school where users can complete an authorization course in board administration with exams and diplomas. #orgbrain #styreskolen #styret #styrearbeid #styreleder #dagligleder #styreportal #styreplattform #ledelse #digitalisering #maskinlæring "kunstigintelligens #innovasjon

OncoImmunity is a bioinformatics company providing unique machine-learning software to identify tumor-specific mutations that can be targeted by a patient’s own immune system (known as neoantigens). The OncoImmunity solution is important because recent breakthroughs in the field of Immuno-Oncology (I-O) such as the development of checkpoint inhibitors and personalized cancer vaccines, clearly demonstrate that a patient’s immune system can be harnessed to successfully treat cancer. The cost of identifying tumor-specific mutations in a patient’s cancer using next-generation sequencing (NGS) is now trivial and this technology will be key to enabling truly personalized immunotherapies to be developed in a technically and economically feasible manner. However, the remaining challenge that currently limits the field, and which is addressed by the OncoImmunity solution, is predicting which tumor-specific mutations can stimulate a patient’s immune system i.e. are immunogenic. Using NGS data as input, the OncoImmunity software enables accurate patient selection for cancer immunotherapy and can identify optimal targets for personalized cancer vaccines & cell therapies in a clinically actionable time frame. Beginning from this first product offering, OncoImmunity has the vision to become the world’s leading provider of software to guide cancer immunotherapy to improve survival rates for cancer patients. To achieve this OncoImmunity has assembled a growing team of world-class bioinformaticians, data scientists, and software engineers; developing its cutting-edge machine-learning technology that will help fulfill the promise of immunotherapy in the fight against cancer. OncoImmunity’s technology will disrupt the I-O field by offering regulatory-compliant prediction software on a software-as-a-service basis (SaaS). This will allow big pharma, biotechnology, and immunotherapy companies of any size to access OncoImmunity’s cutting-edge prediction software. The company is headquartered in an ideal scientific and entrepreneurial ecosystem to develop its technology at the Oslo Cancer Cluster Incubator; adjacent to the Institute for Cancer Research and the Norwegian Radium Hospital. OncoImmunity is a privately held company, founded in 2014 by experienced bioinformatics scientists (Dr. Trevor Clancy and Professor Eivind Hovig), and an experienced immunologist with a business development background (Dr. Richard Stratford). The company is backed by private financing from the Norwegian Radium Hospital Research Foundation, the Norwegian Cancer Society, STARTUPLAB, and Grotmol Solutions, in addition to a number of private software investors. The company is also supported by grants awarded from the Norwegian Research Council, Innovation Norway, and the EU. The company has already established both national and international collaborations and pilot projects to develop further proof-of-concept data and validate its software.

Settle Group (formerly Auka) is a Norwegian fintech company enabling banks to launch their own mobile payments service to fight the competition from third-party providers, startups and other banks. In 2016 we were awarded the fastest-growing fintech company in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) by Deloitte. Settle Group has built a white-label financial services platform featuring real-time payments, complex clearing and settlements, card processing and more. Auka is the first regulated financial services company to run fully in the cloud. We first launched our technology to the Norwegian market in 2014 under the brand mCASH. In 2015 we sold the mCASH-operation to SpareBank 1 focusing on global sales of our white-label financial services platform. We’re always on the lookout for skilled personnel sharing our vision to become the backbone of modern banking.

Iris.ai is on a mission to build the world's first AI researcher, a system that will be an invaluable team member in every research team across academia, industry and NGO's. We are an impact driven for-profit company. Our initial product offering is a suite of tools to semi-automate the academic literature reviews, and these tools are being delivered at University Libraries across the Nordics. Our second product suite is a set of tools for researchers in the chemical industry. Our team is a mishmash of impact driven weirdos with a fundamental desire to do really cool things that will leave the world better than we found it.

BlackBeast Pro is a unique docking station delivering desktop class performance to your laptop. Unlimited customization possibilities let you install your favorite graphic card and hard drive while having all the ports you need to implement your desired workflow and charging your laptop simultaneously. Laptops today lack ports, have mediocre graphic performance and are not user upgradeable. With its all-in-one design, BlackBeast Pro gives your laptop desktop performance without compromises. Housing a desktop class graphic card, blazing fast NVMe SSD storage and all essential ports while simultaneously charging your laptop, BlackBeast Pro will get the job done regardless of the challenges. BlackBeast Pro provides tremendous performance, excellent connectivity and versatile workflow for smooth execution of all your demanding tasks. With such power, BlackBeast Pro multiplies the performance of your laptop while being both future proof and backwards compatible. Saving your business time and money. When developing and producing the BlackBeast Pro, we always have the wellbeing of our customers and the environment in focus. To ensure low environmental impact, BlackBeast Pro is made of recyclable aluminium. And, most importantly, there is no need for an additional desktop computer and no need to replace your laptop at the usual intervals. BlackBeast Pro at your service, with its excellent flexibility and user upgradeability. The end result is: Saving the environment, saving money - while enjoying super performance!