Nordic EdTech News #158: 2026-05-25

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I’m Jonathan Viner. I help EdTech leaders and investors turn complexity into clarity, make smarter decisions and scale with confidence and impact. Contact me here to talk about working together.

Hello and welcome to today’s Nordic EdTech News.

In what’s been a pretty quiet fortnight for Nordic EdTech, the loudest signal for change came from the other side of the world. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, directed his state - the largest economy in the US and home of nearly every major AI company in the world - to begin preparing workers and businesses for what he called “the economic disruption” that AI is poised to cause.

His position is clear: “This moment demands that we reimagine the entire system — how we work, how we govern, how we prepare people for the future.” In that light, it’s instructive to consider how the Nordic and Baltic nations are responding to the last part of that call.

In Estonia, the recent Presidential Education Hackathon focused on developing new AI tools to support compulsory education. You’ll find two great summaries from the event here and here. After the event, Markus Villig, Founder and CEO of Bolt, emphasised the importance of building on the event’s impetus and encouraged further investment in the tools created: “we must be ready to fund educational technology more.”

Whilst in Norway, Kari Nessa Nordtun, Minister of Education continues to argue against AI on national television and on social media stating that “for children in school, there are far more important skills to master before they start prompting and AI.” She continues: “AI weakens the deep learning that enables the student to think critically, learn from their own mistakes and put together information for independent thoughts and ideas.”

Similarly in Sweden, industry experts have raised concern that the proposed new curriculum will exclude girls from AI and increase educational inequality.

It's becoming a familiar pattern and one worth challenging. Danish psychologist Svend Brinkmann has done exactly that in Folkeskolen, arguing that screens have not ruined children's wellbeing or their ability to delay gratification. It's an important corrective to a narrative that has too often gone uncontested in our region.

Building on this, it’s clear that leading Nordic EdTech companies are making the changes needed to respond. In a LinkedIn post, Anders Laustsen, Founder and CEO at Famly, acknowledged that the business will have to reinvent itself “to get AI right.” Whilst the team at Kognity are going even further.

The business is 12 months into a journey to transform how it ships “core and supplemental curriculum content for classrooms.” Most recently, they have started advertising for a VP of AI Content Generation, who “will own and scale the engine that makes Kognity world-leading in AI-powered learning content, building the application layer for education while driving a step-change in how high-quality content is created, delivered, and experienced globally.”

These moves resonate given recent research identifying significant concerns about funding gaps for learning resources in Icelandic schools. Íris Gísladóttir, Co-Founder of Evolytes and chair of the Learning Materials Development Fund, has submitted a report to the Ministry of Education showing that spend on educational materials has fallen to just 36% of its 2007 value, leaving around 70% of teachers creating their own resources from scratch.

Iceland currently only spends around 0.4% of primary school operating costs on learning materials (Link). This is compared to a Nordic average of between 1.5% to 4%. Her verdict is blunt: the students who bear the most cost are those who needed the system to work in the first place.

This is precisely why the Nordic EdTech Summit in Oslo on 9 September is the place to be. Hugo Wernhoff will be setting out how Kognity is approaching this AI transformation in practice. He'll also be joined on the programme by Íris, who’ll combine her policy perspectives with the commercial realities of running a leading global EdTech business. So with just 250 seats and a track record of selling out, booking now is the only way to guarantee your spot.

And finally, do check out this new report from European Schoolnet on “School digital infrastructure and educational technologies in Europe.” It aims to explore the set-up and use of digital infrastructure provided to / used by schools and the level of control of such technology. It covers 17 education systems including Finland, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden.

If you’ve got a story that you’d like me to include in a future issue of this newsletter, please email hello@10digits.org, tag me on X or LinkedIn or use #nordicedtech / #balticedtech.

Thanks for reading, Jonathan

• Parents and publishers argue for the introduction of a national earmarked pool for teaching materials in compulsory education. (Link)

• Teachers are handling the introduction and use of AI themselves as 3 out of 4 high schools lack guidelines for its use. (Link)

• AI will mean significant changes to how high schools operate: “we cannot maintain examination forms that are based on a reality that no longer exists.” (Link)

• Danish universities have no other option than paying DKK 64 million to Oracle in new license fees. (Link)

• Great to see this detailed analysis of how students actually used AI when given free access to Miira. Spoiler: we need to teach them “how to use AI and how not to use it.” (Link)

• €11 million will be allocated to the Eesti.ai initiative this year. One of the key aims is to improve the population’s AI skills. (Link)

• “Why Estonia is gambling on AI in schools.” Don’t agree with this clickbait headline, but an interesting summary of national priorities.

• Jussi Kajala, CEO at 3DBear, featured in some promotion for Vantaa’s vibrant startup ecosystem. (Link)

• Great to see the outputs from the Learning Future Hackathon, which aimed to develop new HE solutions using data from Finland’s shared platform. (Link)

• Congratulations to everyone at Bara tala for winning the Iceland Artificial Intelligence Prize 2026. (Link)

• Per pupil per year funding for educational resources varies from €9.90 to €73 across the country. (Link)

• The Ministry of Education and Science will introduce electronic pupil registration and more extensive digital record keeping / documentation. (Link)

• Edu Challenger, Lithuania’s EdTech Accelerator programme, has released an impact report showing ”strong results.” (Link)

• Turing College is launching an AI leadership programme with Google Cloud, who are funding 200 scholarships across the Baltics. (Link)

• Kristiansand municipality tried to run a screen-free pilot. No compulsory schools wanted to get involved. (Link)

• Oslo schools will receive an extra NOK 15 million for physical books with a further NOK 20 million allocated for a multi-year investment in science. (Link)

• Good review of discussions at Læringsfestival and NKUL.

• Brattvåg Secondary School left Microsoft for itslearning emphasising: “we have chosen a partner that truly understands Norwegian schools, with pedagogical support based in Norway.” (Link)

• The Tryggere digital læring (Safer Digital Learning) initiative is now live “to make it safer to choose and use digital solutions in schools.”

• Bård Kåsin has been named the new CEO of Visma Flyt. His work and priorities are outlined here.

• Wittario launched their platform in the UK at the Learning Technologies Exhibition & Conference. (Link)

• Swedish National Agency for Education: Digital national final exams may be delayed until 2031.

• Interesting to note that the Swedish government will provide school pupils with a digital cultural canon. (Link)

• Detailed and wide-ranging interview with Fredrik Bengtsson, CEO of Albert Group. (Link)

• NE is entering into a strategic collaboration with WOOF “to integrate tools that strengthen student well-being and participation directly in teaching.” (Link)

• Klar is rapidly gaining traction with Swedish university customers for their learning agent solution. (Link)

• Great to see Magma hosting English MAT CEOs at a round table event at the Swedish Embassy in London. (Link)

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