Venture loves talking about “the future.”

But the future isn’t a moodboard or a vague direction of travel, it’s a set of practical shifts happening right now in what gets built, what gets funded, and what it actually takes to scale in a market that’s stopped rewarding noise and started rewarding outcomes.

In the latest episode of Venture Capital in Scandinavia, we sat down with Cecilie Skjong, Investment Manager at Skyfall Ventures, to move past the 2025 hype and talk about what’s changing as we head into 2026. She looks for patterns, outliers, and the kind of execution that holds up when the bar gets higher and the margin for error gets smaller.

And one thing came through clearly. The Nordic scale-up playbook is being rewritten in real time. Not because ambition is shrinking, but because the route to scale is getting sharper, leaner, and more system-driven.

From chatbots to autonomous agents

The past year was dominated by AI that talks to humans. Copilots, chatbots, prompt workflows, and “AI inside” as a feature. Useful, yes, but still largely interface-led. The next step is less visible, but far more structural.

Cecilie’s view is that 2026 is where we’ll feel the shift from AI as a tool you interact with, to AI as systems that operate on your behalf. Autonomous agents. Agent-to-agent workflows. Software that doesn’t just answer questions, but coordinates across other systems. Pulling data, triggering actions, moving work forward without needing constant supervision.

That changes what defensibility looks like. If 2023–2025 was a race to build the best AI experience, 2026 becomes a race to build the best AI plumbing. Integration quality, reliability, security, and whether your product fits into an automated workflow starts to matter more than how slick the front-end feels.

Because in an agentic environment, products don’t just compete for user attention. They compete for inclusion in the workflow. If your solution doesn’t “play well with others,” it won’t play at all.

The rise of the lean 10x team

There used to be a certain prestige in headcount. Hiring fast felt like progress. Big teams signalled momentum, and momentum made fundraising easier.

In 2026, that signal is changing.

Cecilie highlighted something we’re seeing more of across the Nordics. Startups reaching meaningful milestones with a fraction of the staff that would have been considered normal just a few years ago. Same goals. Smaller teams. Less coordination overhead. More leverage per person.

This is where the “10x engineer” stops sounding like Silicon Valley mythology and starts looking like a straightforward consequence of better tooling. The most effective people are being amplified, not replaced, by agentic AI. Stronger internal systems and clearer decision-making. When your team is small, clarity isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s survival. When your systems are tight, output compounds.

But this also raises expectations. If you can build faster with fewer people, the market will expect you to reach commercial validation sooner. “Efficiency” stops being a strategy and becomes a baseline, especially as you move toward Series A where the question isn’t “can this work?” but “can this scale without collapsing under complexity?”

It’s not just about being lean. It’s about being deliberately designed.

National resilience is getting a rebrand

For a long time, DefenseTech was treated as niche, politically complicated, or simply not something generalist investors wanted to touch. That’s no longer the world we’re in.

What’s emerging instead is a reframing. National resilience, dual-use tech, and infrastructure-grade solutions that serve both commercial needs and public preparedness. In today’s geopolitical reality, resilience has moved from “interesting” to “urgent.” And when something becomes urgent, budgets and capital follow.

In the Nordics, this is showing up in EnergyTech in a very specific way. More pragmatic focus on decentralised energy systems, grid stability, and the kind of infrastructure that makes a society less fragile when conditions change.

High stakes. High complexity. Real demand. And an area where Nordic companies are uniquely positioned to lead, because the region already has deep competence, strong public-private collaboration, and a lived relationship with energy systems that are both advanced and exposed.

Hire for leverage, not volume

Put these three shifts together and you get a picture of the next generation of Nordic winners. They may be smaller than what we’re used to. But they’ll also be sharper, designed for speed, automation, and outcome density rather than headcount and activity.

And that changes the talent conversation.

At Amby, we’ve always cared about building teams that actually work in real life, not just on paper. What Cecilie’s perspective reinforces is that “the right talent” in 2026 looks different. You don’t hire for volume. You hire for leverage. You hire people who can build systems, not just execute tasks. People who understand how AI changes workflows, not just how to use tools. People who can make good decisions under uncertainty and still deliver clean execution.

Because when you run lean, every hire matters more. Every gap shows. Every unclear role becomes friction. The upside is huge, but only if the team is built intentionally.

The Nordic ecosystem is becoming more specialised, more efficient, and frankly more interesting. The question isn’t whether the shift is happening. It already is.

The question is whether you are ready for it.