Hiring someone in another country usually means buying four services from three vendors and reconciling the paperwork yourself.
Fronted raised €17M to collapse that mess into one product. Swedish investor Kaknas Invest led the round, with Skagerak Capital participating alongside existing backers Antler and Sondo Capital and a group of angels.
The Oslo company bundles cross-border recruitment, employer-of-record coverage, and company entity setup and management. Underneath sits software that automates payroll calculations, tax reconciliation and employment contract generation, encoding local labour rules directly into the platform instead of routing them through an advisor.
Compounding a crowded category
Employer-of-record is a busy market with well-funded incumbents, so Fronted’s differentiator is scope rather than a single service. Most EOR providers stop at payroll and compliance for the employer. Founder and chief executive Marius Blaker Hogeveld argues that clients want the whole expansion problem handled, including the entity they need before they can even sign a lease, and that existing vendors obscure pricing while adding cost.
Co-founder Hans Nyvold Kjellby serves as chairman and chief commercial officer, and both are positioning the company as a Nordic alternative to US-dominated platforms for European founders expanding outward.
The money goes into geography
Fronted says the capital will fund commercial expansion, extend its operating infrastructure to 70 countries, and build out an AI-powered payroll engine. Getting to 70 countries is the hard part: each jurisdiction adds statutory rules, filing calendars and changing contribution rates, and every one of them is a place the software can be wrong.
For Nordic founders, the appeal is obvious. For everyone else, the question is whether another all-in-one platform beats a specialist that has done one country deeply.
