Startup in Iceland
Every startup record the directory holds in Iceland.
Showing 1–20 of 22 Startup · Iceland
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Startup · Iceland results
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1939 Games
1939 Games is an independent game development studio founded in Reykjavik in 2015 by veterans of CCP Games. The studio developed KARDS, a free-to-play digital collectible card game set in World War II, which launched on Steam in 2019. KARDS blends traditional CCG mechanics with real-world historical units and strategies from the Second World War and has built a global player community.
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50skills
50skills is a Reykjavik-based HR SaaS platform that streamlines the full employee journey — from hiring through onboarding, crossboarding and offboarding — in a single workspace. The platform centralises employee data, eliminates repetitive data entry across HR systems, and integrates with the tools employers already use. Founded in 2017, the company raised €2.5M from Frumtak Ventures in 2022 and has since grown to approximately 22 employees serving customers in over 20 countries. Major Icelandic clients include Icelandair, PLAY Airlines, IKEA, Vodafone, Securitas and Domino's. The company reported $2.1M in annual revenue in 2024.
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Alda
Alda is an Icelandic HR-tech startup founded in 2022 that provides a culture intelligence platform for measuring and improving workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The platform combines inclusion surveys, gamified micro-learning, AI-powered action plans, and real-time DEI dashboards. Alda has raised €2.9 million from Frumtak Ventures and Tennin, and counts Aker Solutions, Icelandair, and Avalanche Studios among its clients. It was named a Gartner Cool Vendor in 2025.
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Algalíf
Algalíf is an Icelandic biotechnology company founded in 2012 that produces high-grade natural astaxanthin from microalgae using 100% renewable geothermal energy in a fully enclosed indoor photobioreactor system. The company is certified carbon-negative, binding 75 tonnes of CO2 annually, and holds over $50M in cumulative investment. In 2025 Algalíf launched Astalíf 15, the world's first 15% natural astaxanthin oleoresin, and broke ground on the world's largest natural astaxanthin facility (12,500 m²). The board initiated IPO preparations for 2025 and appointed new leadership following the departure of long-serving CEO Orri Björnsson.
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Atmonia
Atmonia is developing a breakthrough electro-catalytic process for synthesising ammonia directly from air, water and renewable electricity at ambient temperature and pressure — with zero carbon emissions. Its precious-metal-free catalyst technology, protected by multiple patents, could disrupt the conventional Haber-Bosch process that accounts for roughly 2% of global CO2 emissions. Founded in 2016, the company has raised $3M in equity alongside $10M in non-dilutive funding from sources including the Icelandic Research Fund, Technology Development Fund and Horizon Europe. Atmonia collaborates with Fujitsu on AI-accelerated catalyst development and leads the EU-funded VERGE project.
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Carbfix
Carbfix dissolves captured CO2 in water and injects it into basalt rock formations, where it permanently mineralises into solid carbonate stone in under two years. Founded in 2007 as a joint research initiative by Reykjavik Energy, the University of Iceland, CNRS France, and Columbia University's Earth Institute, the company operates at the Hellisheiði geothermal power plant. In 2023 it secured a $117M EU grant and became the first company to receive an EU permit for onshore carbon capture & storage, with capacity for ~106,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. It was a WIPO Global Awards 2025 finalist and partners with Climeworks on the Mammoth DAC plant.
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Carbon Recycling International
Carbon Recycling International (CRI) designs, licenses and sells its proprietary Emissions-to-Liquids (ETL) process technology for producing green methanol from captured CO2 emissions and green hydrogen. Founded in 2006 and operating at industrial scale since 2012, CRI is globally recognised as a leader in CO2-to-methanol technology. The company raised $30M led by Equinor Ventures and counts Geely, Methanex and Eyrir Invest among its major shareholders. CRI's technology has been deployed in commercial projects in China, including one of the world's most efficient CO2-to-methanol plants built in partnership with Jiangsu Sailboat.
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CCP Games
CCP Games is the Reykjavik studio behind EVE Online, the long-running sandbox space MMO that has become one of the most culturally distinctive video games ever built in Europe: a single persistent universe shared by all players, with a player-driven economy, alliances, and wars that have produced academic papers and international news coverage. Founded in 1997, CCP effectively bootstrapped Iceland's modern games industry and remains the anchor of Reykjavik's interactive-entertainment cluster. The studio was acquired by South Korea's Pearl Abyss in 2018 but kept its Icelandic operations and brand, and has since expanded into new IP explorations, third-party developer partnerships, and blockchain-adjacent experiments around player-owned assets. For the directory, CCP illustrates how a small European capital can sustain a live-operations games business at a scale usually associated with Tokyo, Los Angeles, or Helsinki.
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Controlant
Controlant is a Reykjavik-born supply-chain visibility company that combines reusable IoT data loggers, cellular-connected gateways, and a cloud analytics platform to give pharma manufacturers, 3PLs, and retailers real-time temperature, humidity, and location data on every shipment in a cold chain. The company became internationally recognized during the COVID-19 pandemic as one of Pfizer's primary visibility partners for global vaccine distribution, where its devices were used to monitor ultra-cold shipments through long intercontinental routes. Beyond pharma, Controlant's platform is used for food, biologics, and other temperature-sensitive goods, with a commercial model that charges per shipment rather than per device so customers avoid the usual capex headaches of traditional loggers. It is the clearest example of Iceland producing a deep-tech, globally relevant supply-chain platform rather than a pure consumer or gaming play.
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Genki Instruments
Genki Instruments is a Reykjavik music technology hardware company that creates expressive wearable controllers for musicians and producers. Its flagship product, the Wave MIDI ring, lets performers control sound, effects and DAW parameters using natural hand gestures including tilt, pan, roll, vibrato, tap and click — compatible with Ableton Live, Logic Pro, Pro Tools and more. Founded in 2015 by Daniel Gretarsson, Haukur Ragnarsson Isfeld and Jón Helgi Holmgeirsson, the company won the Icelandic Design Prize in 2019. In 2026 Genki shipped the Katla, a new hybrid polyphonic synthesizer, confirming the studio's ongoing hardware output.
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Handpoint
Handpoint is an embedded payments technology company with an office in Reykjavik, Iceland, alongside offices in the UK, US, and Spain, that helps SaaS businesses and financial institutions build payment solutions covering card terminals, face-to-face payments across North America, Europe, and South Africa, an e-commerce suite for Europe, and real-time payments data via its APIs.
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Kerecis
Kerecis is an Icelandic biotech and medical technology company known for developing wound-healing products derived from fish skin. Its work is notable because it turns a locally abundant natural material into a clinically relevant regenerative scaffold used in difficult wound-care cases, including burns, trauma, and chronic ulcers. The biological rationale and manufacturing approach set it apart from software-led health companies: this is a deep life-science and materials business built around research, regulatory rigor, and medical adoption. In the European ecosystem, Kerecis is a useful example of how world-class biotech can emerge from a small geography when the product is grounded in differentiated science and clear clinical utility. It expands the directory's health coverage into advanced materials and tissue regeneration, complementing digital health and wearable platforms without overlapping with them. For the broader startup map, Kerecis shows that high-impact European innovation is not limited to apps or infrastructure, but also includes biologically sophisticated products with global medical significance.
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Lucinity
Lucinity is an Icelandic RegTech company founded in 2018 by Gudmundur Kristjansson that builds AI-powered financial crime prevention software for banks and financial institutions. Its platform combines human analyst workflows with machine intelligence to automate investigation, case management, and regulatory reporting for anti-money laundering (AML) operations. Lucinity was named Iceland's Knowledge Company of the Year for 2024 and has offices in Reykjavik and New York.
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Meniga
Meniga is a digital banking technology company founded in Reykjavik in 2009, in the aftermath of Iceland's financial crisis. It provides white-label personal finance management, data enrichment, open banking, and carbon footprint tracking solutions to major retail banks. Meniga's platform is used by more than 90 million digital banking customers across 30+ countries, with clients including Santander and Iceland's Landsbankinn. The company has offices in Reykjavik, London, and Warsaw.
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Monerium
Monerium is an Icelandic fintech company founded in 2015 that issues regulated stablecoins — most notably EURe, an onchain euro — on public blockchains. In 2019 it became the world's first entity to receive an e-money license for blockchain-based token issuance under EU regulations, granted by the Financial Supervisory Authority of Iceland. Monerium is authorised as both an Electronic Money Institution and a Virtual Asset Service Provider and enables Web3-native IBAN payments across Ethereum, Polygon, and Gnosis Chain.
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Mussila
Mussila is an Icelandic EdTech company that teaches children aged 6-10 the fundamentals of music — pitch, rhythm, music reading and theory — through interactive app-based lessons, games and creative tools. Founded in 2015 by Hilmar Þór Birgisson and Margrét J. Sigurðardóttir, the platform uses a Learn, Play, Create & Practice methodology validated in school pilots in Estonia and Iceland, where students showed 20% better content retention. Mussila has won the Nordic EdTech Awards 2019, the Parents Choice Award 2019, and the Academics Choice Award 2020. The company has since expanded into literacy with Mussila WordPlay and is available on iOS and Android.
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Optitog
Optitog (Optitog ehf.) is a Reykjavik-based fishing gear technology company, headquartered at the Ocean Cluster House, developing the Virtual Trawl, a patented light-beam system that herds prawn off the seafloor with less than 0.5% bottom contact, replacing conventional trawl doors and ground gear. The technology reduces towing resistance and fuel consumption, cuts unwanted bycatch, and avoids seafloor habitat damage compared with conventional bottom trawling for prawn fisheries.
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PayAnalytics
PayAnalytics is a Reykjavik-founded pay equity software company, co-founded in 2016 by Dr. Margret Vilborg Bjarnadottir, that helps HR teams identify and close pay gaps through pay equity analysis, EU Pay Transparency Directive compliance workflows, value-based job comparison, workforce diversity analytics, and customized remediation recommendations. The company was acquired by compensation management company beqom in December 2023 and continues to operate under the PayAnalytics brand as part of the beqom group.
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SagaNatura
SagaNatura is a Hafnarfjörður-based Icelandic biotech company producing premium natural ingredients from Iceland's pristine environment, including high-purity natural astaxanthin from microalgae and wild-grown organic Angelica Archangelica. The company traces its roots to SagaMedica (founded 2000) and KeyNatura (founded 2014), which merged to form the current entity. SagaNatura supplies nutraceutical ingredients to markets in North America and Asia-Pacific, and operates a consumer brand, KeyNatura, sold direct-to-consumer and through distributors worldwide. The company was tracking EUR 23 million in annual sales by 2025 and had been eyeing a potential IPO.
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Sidekick Health
Sidekick Health is a Reykjavik- and Boston-based digital therapeutics company that builds disease-specific care programs delivered through a mobile app, combining behavior-change design, gamification, AI-driven personalization, and clinician oversight to help patients manage chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular risk, and certain cancers. Its programs are sold primarily to pharma companies, payers, and health systems that wrap them around drug therapy or chronic-care pathways, and the company has signed deals with several top-20 pharmaceutical manufacturers to run companion digital programs in multiple therapeutic areas. Founded by two Icelandic physicians, Sidekick is one of the most internationally visible examples of Icelandic health-tech, and together with Kerecis it shows that the country's life-sciences output extends from physical regenerative materials into software-as-medicine.
