The Hub secures funding to strengthen position in Nordic startup recruitment

The Hub, a Nordic recruitment platform focused on startups, has raised €896K (NOK 10 million) from a group of angel investors that includes former alpine skier Aksel Lund Svindal, investor Trond Riiber Knudsen, and founders from Tise, Superside, Kahoot, and Firi. The new funding will be used to further develop its recruitment technology and strengthen its position in the Nordic startup hiring market, with a longer-term goal of expanding into other European markets. The company is focusing on tools designed for startup recruitment, aiming to help founders evaluate candidates on factors beyond traditional résumés, such as working style and fit within early-stage teams.

Since launching in 2015, The Hub has grown into one of the most widely used recruitment platforms for Nordic startups. More than 14,000 startups have used the platform, which today holds 850,000 candidate profiles, four million job applications, and around 10,000 daily active users. Originally launched as a free platform funded by Danske Bank, The Hub was acquired in 2023 by recruitment entrepreneur Thomas Sveum and Mesh, who have since transformed it into a profitable commercial business. With the new capital, The Hub will accelerate its work to become the leading platform for startup recruitment in the Nordics, before expanding into Europe.

The Hub is deliberately betting in the opposite direction of many new AI recruitment companies. While several startups in Europe and the US have raised large sums to build agentic sourcing tools for bigger companies, The Hub will focus on the kind of hiring that defines startups: small teams, high risk, and roles where culture, pace, ownership, and working style often matter as much as the CV.

“Every founder says hiring is one of the most important things they do, but most early-stage companies are still forced to use tools that weren’t built for them. They are looking for people with a startup mindset: ownership, adaptability, pace, and the ability to thrive in ambiguity. Yet those qualities are almost impossible to assess from a CV alone. Today, founders often have to speak with every promising candidate before they can understand whether that person will truly fit. The Hub has always been different because it was built for startups from day one. Now we’re building The Hub 2.0 from a profitable starting point, with the data, trust, and investors needed to build startup recruitment right for the AI era,” says Thomas Sveum.

For a startup, a single hire can change the entire company. That’s why The Hub believes the recruitment platform of the future must do more than help companies get more candidates; it has to help them understand who actually fits, can thrive, and can create outsized value in an early-stage business.

In 2026, The Hub aims to dominate startup recruitment in the Nordics. The ambition is for every relevant startup and scaleup opportunity in the region to be on The Hub, and for the platform to become the best in the Nordics at creating strong matches in this specific niche. European expansion may come later. First, The Hub will become the platform where Nordic startup recruitment happens.

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