Seed-stage capital for founders building the intelligence layer behind modern HR — talent acquisition, workforce planning, skills development, and people analytics. Helsinki-based, Europe-focused.

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$55M under management
13 portfolio companies
2021 founded in Helsinki
"Most HR software vendors added AI to existing workflows. The companies worth backing are the ones who started with the model and built the workflow around it — because those two products are not comparable."

Antti Virtanen, Managing Partner

Sammalkko backs seed-stage startups applying machine learning to the full people-management lifecycle: talent sourcing and candidate screening, workforce intelligence and skills gap analysis, L&D matching and ROI measurement, and compensation benchmarking. We invest $1M–$3M at Seed, occasionally Pre-Seed for exceptional founder-market fit.

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Portfolio

13 companies across talent acquisition, workforce intelligence, L&D, and compensation

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Eightfold AI
Beamery
Leena AI
Retrain.ai
Fetcher
Textio
Hirelogic
Phenom
Screenloop
Growthspace
Sana Labs
Pave
Findem

Latest Thinking

All Insights
2026-05-21 Antti Virtanen

The AI Talent Stack in 2026: Where the Market Stands

Three years into AI-native HR tech investment, the stack has clarified into four distinct infrastructure layers — each with different competitive dynamics.

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2026-04-09 Elina Korhonen

Workforce Intelligence in the Nordics: Enterprise Readiness vs. Market Reality

Nordic enterprises are ahead of their peers on data governance, but behind on willingness to let AI make consequential people decisions.

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2026-03-12 Jaakko Laine

Hiring Loops Are Broken. Here Is What NLP Actually Fixes.

Most NLP applications in hiring improve search quality but leave the structural dysfunction of the hiring loop untouched.

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