Tales from People Q1 2026
Welcoming 2026, and new beginnings at People Ventures. The first part of the year brought things we'd been looking forward to. Anders finally joined us in January, and as if that wasn't enough, Dylan joined shortly after as our new Investment Analyst, out there finding the best founders in the Nordics. The portfolio grew too, and we’ve welcomed Gustav and Opally.
Astrid, co-founder of LEIA Health, came by our office to walk us through their latest report - the first large-scale study of how parental leave is actually managed in Swedish organisations, and what it costs when it isn't. Hosted.ai raised a seed round, welcoming Creandum and Repeat Ventures, Understory launched a new product, and Nalvin was part of Slack’s global partner launch. These are some of the stories that happened around us in the first part of this year.
Our team is growing
In January, we welcomed Anders Frederiksen as General Partner and Dylan Bezonsky as Investment Analyst.
Anders is a founder by heart. Around twenty years ago, he and a friend started Planday at a bar in Copenhagen – frustrated with how hard it was to coordinate work shifts. What started as a solution to their own problem became a global platform used by shift-based businesses around the world. With us, he is using all his lessons learned to help our founders fast forward.
Dylan followed a different path. She grew up between continents, spent her teenage years working with elephants in Thailand and animals in Peru, and later studied economics at UC Berkeley before going into corporate banking at JPMorgan Chase. At some point, the work felt too narrow – so she made a list of three countries to move to. Denmark made the cut because someone told her Copenhagen was a coffee heaven. She's been with us since January, supporting sourcing, research, and our investment process.
Welcoming Opally
Last summer, Gustav Søndergård stayed at a hotel in Bornholm. Behind the desk, receptionists were juggling more than any one person reasonably could or should.
He had spent years at Understory, absorbing both the commercial and technical sides of building. At the same time, he had started using AI to write code. A thought followed: if it can do that, it can likely handle something like a well-crafted email. So he started building.
By autumn, it had moved beyond a side project. He told his manager, Lasse, who introduced him to Anders, our General Partner. From there, Gustav showed up every few weeks with progress. No churn, every trial converting, and hotel groups rolling it out across all their properties once it's in the door.
What he built is Opally – an AI assistant designed for hotel receptions, handling communication that would otherwise sit with already stretched staff. Though he was earlier than the founders we usually back, we couldn't let him or Opally pass by. Some things are worth moving early on.
Hosted.ai raises a $19M seed round
Most of the hardware powering AI is sitting doing nothing. More than half the time, it's unused. Every question asked to ChatGPT uses around 10% of a GPU's capacity – the remaining 90% goes nowhere. And the industry's answer has been to buy more.
Ditlev, Narendar, James and Julian founded Hosted.ai in 2024 to change that. The four of them have spent 15 years building infrastructure together – across the dotcom era, the cloud era, and now the GPU era. They gave service providers a platform to get more out of the GPU capacity they already have, and help them build a profitable business doing it.
Eleven months after the pre-seed round, they closed their seed with Creandum and Repeat.vc. Before the announcement, Ditlev wrote on LinkedIn that a funding announcement is a promise. You have the backing to do what you said you'd do. The question is whether you keep it.
So we asked him: what is yours?
"This funding lets us move faster: more platform, more partners, more regions. We're building the operating system for the GPU economy, and this round puts us in a strong position to do exactly that." – Ditlev, CEO & Co-founder, Hosted.ai
Understory launches Bloom
Most experience businesses run on full calendars some weeks and half-empty ones the next. A tasting with two empty seats or a boat trip leaving with five instead of eight. The experience runs regardless – but the economics shift with every empty spot.
Understory knows that challenge well. After years of running campaigns for experience businesses, they turned that knowledge into a product. Bloom automates social ads built for tours, tastings, and workshops – connect your calendar, set a budget, and Bloom handles the rest.
Early results are already showing. Jacob Grønlund, founder of Knallertoplevelser.dk, tried it ahead of Christmas and saw an 85.7% increase in gift card sales and close to 50% increase in revenue.
For Lasse Kjær, one of Understory's founders, that's exactly the point: "We have spent a few years building the infrastructure, and now Understory no longer just enables your work – it does the work for you, replacing expensive, inefficient outsourcing with AI-powered marketing that runs itself."
Nalvin, now in Slack
For most teams, work doesn't live in documents. It lives in conversations – in Slack threads where decisions are made, in the quick back-and-forth that rarely gets written down. That's exactly where Nalvin was missing.
Slack has opened up for AI agents to search conversations in real time, and Nalvin is part of that global launch. Pontus, Fredrik and Pascal have been building toward this.
"I catch the decisions, feedback and 'wait, did we agree on this?' moments before they turn into 47 unread notifications for the product manager. I already connect tickets, code, meetings and CRM. Slack was the missing piece." – Nalvin