Norway's Fronted raises €1.7m seed led by Kaknäs Invest to take its EOR platform to 70 countries

Fronted, a Norwegian startup that helps companies hire, employ and pay staff in other countries, has raised €1.7m (NOK 18m) in a seed round led by the Swedish investment firm Kaknäs Invest. The round comes less than a year after a $1m pre-seed and gives the company money to extend its employment operations to 70 countries.

Skagerak Capital joined as a new investor. Antler and Sondo Capital, which backed the pre-seed in December 2025, put in more money, and a group of new angel investors also took part. One report of the deal also lists Play Capital among the returning backers and puts the round at roughly $2m.

Kaknäs Invest is a privately owned Swedish firm that backs founders building companies in the Nordic region. Its lead role makes this a cross-border Nordic deal, with Swedish money heading a Norwegian round.

One provider instead of a vendor in every country

Fronted's pitch is aimed at a familiar problem for European scale-ups. A company that wants to hire in Portugal, Poland and the United States at the same time usually ends up working with separate payroll bureaus, local lawyers and compliance advisers in each market. Every extra supplier adds cost and paperwork, and pricing is often hard to compare.

The startup bundles three services that are usually sold separately. It runs cross-border recruitment, acts as Employer of Record (EOR) so a client can employ people in a country where it has no legal entity, and sets up and manages local subsidiaries once a client wants its own presence. Fronted also offers a Contractor of Record option for freelance staff.

Behind the service sits software that does much of the routine work. It calculates payroll, reconciles tax and drafts employment contracts, with each country's labour rules written into the system. Fronted says this cuts manual steps, makes its prices easier to understand and keeps clients compliant across jurisdictions.

“We are building the invisible software layer that takes away the headache of cross-border administration, giving ambitious companies a trusted Nordic partner to scale globally with total transparency and ease,” said Marius Blaker Høgevold, co-founder and CEO.

That phrase, a trusted Nordic partner, is the core of the positioning. Fronted is selling itself to European companies as a nearby provider that is open about what it charges.

Where the €1.7m goes

The company has named three uses for the money. Part will go into sales and commercial growth. Part will fund the operational setup needed to serve clients in 70 countries. The rest will go into further work on its AI-driven payroll engine, the piece of the product that turns local rules into calculations.

The round is modest for a company with global ambitions, but it is roughly 1.7 times the pre-seed, and the figures that circulated alongside it suggest the company is growing into it. According to one report on the round, Fronted has about 100 customers across Europe and the US, has grown annual recurring revenue fourfold year on year, employs around 30 people and is aiming to be profitable in 2027. The company has not published those numbers itself.

Founders who have done this before

Fronted was founded in 2023 by Høgevold and Hans Nyvold Kjellby. Høgevold, the chief executive, was previously chief operating officer at the Norwegian crypto exchange Firi. Kjellby, who chairs the board and serves as chief commercial officer, has a legal background and is a co-founder of SafetyWing.

That mix of regulated-finance operations and remote-work experience fits the business. Employment platforms live or die on getting payroll, tax and contracts right in many legal systems at once, and an error in one country can cost a client both money and trust.

When it raised its pre-seed, Fronted described its goal as putting recruitment, onboarding, payroll, compliance and offboarding into one workflow. The seed round is meant to turn that workflow into something it can sell in far more markets. The test now is whether a 30-person team can add dozens of countries without losing the transparency it uses as its main selling point, and whether it can reach profitability on the 2027 timeline it has set.