Danske Tech Talks 2026

Sep 9, 2026

Summary

Aira leverages AI and licensed data to deliver sales intelligence for European B2B clients, focusing on seamless CRM integration and high-value use cases. Early traction is strong, with a partner-driven go-to-market strategy and a clear path to profitability, supported by an experienced team and positive client feedback.

I have my friend with me here, Daniel Wikberg from Aira. Daniel, we will do a 15-minute presentation roughly, and then 15-minute Q&A. The virtual floor is yours, Daniel. Go ahead, please. Thank you. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining today. My name is Daniel Wikberg. I am the founder and CEO of AI company Aira. Aira is an AI company in the business of providing sales and business intelligence to European customers. We do this by licensing data on more than 65 million European companies, that we put into our AI models and sell to our customers to help them achieve their business outcomes. We listed on First North in the end of May, so Aira is a very young company. I am going to talk a little bit more about the background and the history. Before I do that, I am going to talk a little bit about the part that most people in my position leave out. While we see a massive opportunity in Aira, we see a huge market, and we believe we have a great product for the customers we are selling to. It is early stage. We got our first customers a few months ago. We are not profitable. It is my firm belief that in 2026, if you want to create value by building a tech or a SaaS company, that requires scale, and it requires rapid scale. That is what we are going after. I am doing this with my own time and my own money, and I am the largest shareholder in Aira. Just a brief history about where we are coming from. Aira did not start from scratch. My background, I spent 25 years thinking about one problem, how to help B2B companies find their next opportunity, how to find their next customer, and how to understand and grow the customers they have. I started a company called Upsales almost 25 years ago, which is also listed on Nasdaq, and Aira was born as an innovation project inside of Upsales roughly two years ago. We did a spinoff from Upsales a couple of months ago. We have a long track record that the team that is building and executing Aira, they are coming from Upsales. It's a team with more than a decade experience of building and selling exactly the kind of tools that Aira is building and selling. That's a short background. I'm going to talk a little bit about the problem we are solving, the problem we are focusing on to help our clients. Every company in Europe, every B2B company has the same question: Where is the next opportunity? They are thinking about how to grow their business, how to find the next great client, and how to grow the clients they have. Almost nobody can answer this, because they are reliant on scattered data in various platforms. That data is usually entered manually by a stressed-out salesperson, and also the data is highly fluent. You have a quite significant percentage of companies in Europe changing ownership and going bust, and new companies arrive and so on. It's a big problem to try to keep track of everything that's going on in the market. This is the kind of problem we help our clients solve, because most companies guess. They guess, and they act on the wrong kind of data, and they usually act six or 12 months too late. What we are basing the product on, we are buying licensed data. Again, 65 million companies in Europe with financial data and ownership data. Aira reads 3 million news articles every single day and maps this news flow to these licensed companies to help our clients understand in real time what's going on and where they should focus their attention next. Talking a little bit more about the product. With the help of Aira, our clients can move five to ten times faster than their competitors because Aira frees up a lot of their time. If you look at the studies that have been done on the work of sales teams and entrepreneurs, a big chunk of their day goes to manual prospecting and to manual research about existing and potential clients. This is what Aira automates. The data they need is typically not available online, so you cannot use general LLMs or AI tools to find them online. They're often buried in filings which vary from country to country, requiring a lot of manual work to find what you're looking for, but Aira does this in two seconds. That's basically our business. We launched the product in April. The first version was a standalone product, which clients could buy just paying with a credit card online. We had some initial traction on that product, but quickly we realized when talking to clients that a lot of clients wanted to use this data inside of their existing sales and marketing tool. We built an integration to HubSpot and to Salesforce, and that product is called Aira Connect, and that is where we put 100% of our focus right now, because that is where we see the biggest traction. We see we charge 5 to 10 times more per client compared to the standalone product. The big benefit of focusing on this product is that instead of having two of the world's biggest software companies as our competitors, they are now our partners. The go-to-market plan for Aira is working through the very large partner network of HubSpot agencies and Salesforce consultants. I can say on a personal note that after being a competitor of Salesforce and HubSpot for two decades, it is almost annoying to see how much easier it is to be their partner. We are very excited about that, and we see a very straightforward way of reaching hundreds of thousands of potential clients by executing this go-to-market plan. I will mention just briefly what is coming next. Because what we are also seeing with the customers we are signing now is that most of them have something specific in mind that they want to achieve. We see higher deal values, we see higher win rates when we focus on the more specific use cases that our customers have, and the benefit of being an AI native company with zero technical debt and a very modern platform, we can move very quickly. We are moving from a data provider to a platform. We think that the future of Aira will be some version of a niche vibe coding platform, if you will, because we are already solving very specific use cases for clients without having to write any custom code. Since we have the data, we are able to provide those solutions with a much higher degree of quality than you would get if you use a generic vibe coding tool. That is something that we are very excited about, and we think that it allows us to solve higher value problems and find more higher value clients. To summarize, we are focusing on helping our clients find the next opportunity. No one has this problem solved pretty much. Everyone is working blind, so it is a huge problem. We have the data they need inside their systems they are already using. We have two of the biggest software companies in the world as our partners instead of our competition. We are charging five figure EUR per customers, and the team is booked back-to-back with demos. Again, it is early days, it might not work, but we see a huge opportunity. If you want to learn more, check out aira.app. I can also be reached at daniel@aira.app. Thank you. Excellent. It is not often you hear a CEO say it might not work, but we are here to give it a fair try. Yes. Quite refreshing, Daniel. You mentioned a lot of the things that I almost assume you will answer now, but I just want to double-click on why has this not been done before, seeing as you come from the adjacent industry. You have seen firsthand why Aira is needed. Yeah. Why has it not been done before? We have been addressing these use cases in my previous business in Upsales for years. One of the actually selling points for Upsales was to sell this kind of data together with a platform. But Upsales is a very niche product for a local market. That was one of the reasons why we started Aira, because we saw this huge opportunity to reach a bigger market. But I think historically, you buy your sales tool from one provider, and then you buy data from one or more providers, and then you try to make it work yourself. I think it is just traditionally how the market has been working in the past. Why are you guys the most suitable ones to execute on this? Because clearly with the growth of AI and AI nativity in general, there is probably more people who are thinking about how do I add intelligence into the sales process. Yeah. Why is the Aira team and you most suited to do this? Why do you think you have the right to win here? Yes, I think that's the most exciting part. We are still alone in using this license data in the way we are doing it. The team, the CTO of Aira, is the former CTO of Upsales. The CMO was the former CMO of Upsales. It's a team that has been spending more than a decade working specifically on this kind of problem. I would say the devil is in the details. When we started working with this data, I think it's 15 years ago now, there are hundreds and hundreds of pitfalls as how you use the data because you have variations from local markets, and it takes a lot of time to learn that. My team, it's the only thing we've been doing for more than a decade. I think we have a very good shot at doing something very good here. Excellent. We'll get to both go-to-market and the product layer here. The go-to-market layer. I just want to touch upon how the product works. You mentioned that you purchase external data sets, and you supplement them with non-conventional ones, like reading news articles and whatnot. Yeah. Is the ambition to consistently add data as you grow data sets, or do you feel like you've reached the end of the road as far as what you want to provide, and now it's a question of adding functionality on top of it? No, I think there are tons of data sources we could add, and we have several of them in our roadmap. The value we bring is we buy data from a couple of different providers, and then we add the 10 plus years of experience, which we call the intelligence layer, into the product, which is how should you work with this data to avoid all the pitfalls. Then we collect a lot of data on our own, which we complement to this data. It's the combination that creates the value, and what makes it straightforward for a customer to use is how we implement it into their existing CRM stack, which we also have a long experience of doing. And on the topic of go-to-market changes, you have gone from direct selling to indirect selling. You mentioned Salesforce and HubSpot as partners. Could you shed some light on what a partner actually means in this case? Yeah. How does the user engage with Aira through HubSpot or Salesforce? How do they purchase an Aira license when using it through HubSpot or Salesforce? So it is a hybrid model, so we have our own sales team talking to each and every client. But the HubSpot partner network, which is the primary focus right now, consists of thousands of HubSpot agencies throughout Europe. So we make these companies our partner. We pay them a revenue share, to create a win-win for them to send clients our way. And what I like about this is, it creates a very straightforward go-to-market plan to execute. We know the names of the companies we need to talk to. We have companies introducing us to the right clients. So, I would say it is almost a luxurious way of doing go-to-market because you know so clearly who you need to talk to. And then we use all kinds of channels, events, digital channels, and direct sales as well to reach them. But it is very straightforward because the list is so clear. Are you native, or not natively integrated, but are you integrated through API structures with the platform in the sense that the user still has to use Aira separately on a different domain, or is Aira embedded, the intelligence tool embedded into their current CRM solution? Yeah, that's a good point, and that's an important part of how we built the product. It's fully embedded, so there's very little friction for the users. We spent quite a lot of time to make it straightforward for. Every company typically has a tech guy who's responsible for the tech stack you're using. We help that guy to set everything up, to make sure it's seamless. The users, they just get the intelligence and the value in the tool they're already comfortable using. It's very seamless. Their experience is almost like it's part of HubSpot or Salesforce. You mentioned, Daniel Wikberg, I just want to be the devil's advocate here, because you mentioned that the product development is increasingly moving into this lovable vibe coding type of solution, and then you have external data sets feeding into that. How do you ensure that 10 years from now, we stand in this room, which I hope we do, that this is not a commodity that Salesforce or HubSpot or Upsales for that matter, themselves provide free of charge, even perhaps as a bundle? Yeah. That's a very good question, and I think the answer is a little bit paradoxical because every tech company needs to think about that increasingly more today compared to 10 years ago. But 10 years ago, I got the same question. Why won't Salesforce build the kind of features that you are claiming that you are unique in doing? I think the answer is scale. In the last 10 years, you have tons of companies who became $100 million revenue companies who are selling a plugin in Salesforce or HubSpot. Because as you grow as a company, when you're Salesforce, you acquire Slack, and you acquire Tableau, you are just too busy servicing your enterprise accounts. I think it opens up a big opportunity for other companies to plug in. But of course, there's no silver bullet. I've been in the industry for 25 years, and the game is to never drop the ball on innovation, to continue to be paranoid and build the product, to make sure that you have an effective go-to-market and a positioning and basically good customer relations. So, yeah. I think at times, if I didn't know you and Aira from the discussions we have had, it would almost come across as you haven't even gotten this to the market. But you are in the market. You've generated, signed clients, and you Absolutely you're starting to ramp up ARR already. Yeah. Could you talk about the customers that today already use Aira and what you're seeing in terms of user behavior from them? Yeah. So, that is why we are moving even more into the platform part of the product. You have a lot of companies who are selling data. You can buy email addresses, and you can buy data from a lot of companies. What we are seeing is that the more specific the use case, the more value we can deliver. One example, we had one client, they were paying, I think, EUR 25,000 to a competitor who is doing what Aira does, but only a part of it. They were lacking a very specific data point, which you can find in these filings, but no one cares about it, no one thinks about it. For us, that was 48 hours later, we could demo that for that client, and they made a switch to Aira. I think that is the important part of finding the specific use cases that are highly valuable and not trying to compete with the customers who are looking at the $5 a month, because there are tons of tools who are very basic. The typical client is a small, medium-sized B2B company from 25 employees up to a couple of hundred employees, who are using HubSpot or Salesforce. Any early signs of them churning so far? No. It is very early days, so it is hard to say. But the customers who are onboarded, they are using the product, they are happy with the product. Especially this early, both the tech team and the go-to-market team are in meetings with customers every single day, because you have to get the detailed feedback. The feedback we are getting is overall very good, I would say. Do you see a risk that Aira being, and I will get back to the question of balance sheet as well, but clearly, if you burn money and you have finite cash resources, there is always a risk, right? Yeah. Especially in this environment. Do you see a risk that your balance sheet impedes your ability to sell in the sense that you engage with customers who perhaps are a bit worried that you will not be around two years from now, or? No, I would not say that. These types of customers, it is typically a very straightforward sales process. I would not say that customers are doing a financial due diligence on a company like Aira before signing a contract. Talking about that, we have a limited runway of cash. Again, we are signing clients, we are starting to generate revenue. We are confident that we will reach break even without having to raise more money. Having said that, the more traction we get, it is a huge market, so if we see opportunities to accelerate, of course, we will consider finding ways of doing that. With this change of go-to-market and sort of market focus, what could you say about the early signs you have seen with partners or the indirect sales channel? You said that your sales reps are out demoing all the time. They are fully booked. You are seeing good early signs, but have you gotten any partners in place, and have you generated your first sale through Salesforce or HubSpot? Yeah, absolutely. The timing is actually in our favor, especially when it comes to HubSpot, because HubSpot used to have a very generous revenue share contract with their partners. They changed that quite recently to make it. HubSpot needs to improve their bottom line, I guess. A lot of HubSpot partners are a little bit pissed off and lost a part of their recurring revenue. That has actually been a very good thing for the discussions we have with them, that Aira is a very straightforward add-on that they could recommend to their clients with very little time invested, and get a recurring revenue share from us. Any partners signed already or perhaps Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. The organization, you've been able to attract a couple of Upsales deserters with you. They did not desert. They were actually in the Aira team one year before inside of Upsales. Yeah. Yeah. I am being harsh now. I am being harsh deliberately. Jokes aside, Daniel Wikberg, how is the organization right now? How are you divided by functions? What are the focal points of the organization right now, given that you are by far the youngest company that we will have participate Yeah in the coming three days here. Yeah. The team is 10 people. Roughly half is tech, and roughly half is go-to-market. But again, in a company at this stage, everyone is doing everything, in a way. So we're really trying to maintain the right kind of startup culture, where you really focus on every single client. Do you have an opportunity on the table? You never lose an opportunity. You do what you have to do to get your first 100, 200, 300 clients. So I'm happy with what I'm seeing in terms of culture. That is a little bit tricky because everyone is coming from an established company with a larger organization. Upsales is not huge, but it's more established than Aira. So I'm happy where we are in that regard. What are the milestones you've set for the organization? What are they working towards, both financially and qualitatively? I think there's something that happens after you sign client number 50. Client one to 10, you're just scrambling to figure out exactly what you need to do. But after you pass 50 clients, I think that's when you start to get the understanding you need to scale further. So that's an important milestone. Of course, reaching breakeven in terms of cash flow. So I think those are the two primary objectives. How many clients do you have today? I will not tell you. No, we didn't report that yet. On the topic of reaching break even, you mentioned earlier as well that if you see growth opportunities, you will pursue those, regardless of if that requires additional investments externally and whatnot. But how do you view the balance between growth and profitability? Do you intend to grow the existing organization into profitability and then scale up from there? Or are you willing to do both in tandem here? I think that's actually also an important milestone, is when you start to see the unit economics in terms of sales, when you start to see that the machine you start to be running efficiently. So that's something we look at every day, like the amount of demos booked, the amount of clients, and then so on. When you start to see that you have no more question marks, I think when you get to that point, it makes sense to start looking at scaling. What exactly that means in terms of balance sheet, we will see. We don't know yet. But we just try to keep an open mind and scale as fast as we can. That's also the team is coming from an environment where we took the company to SEK 150 million in revenue and SEK 60 million in EBITDA with no external capital. So, it's a company that has in their DNA how to execute efficiently. So we will try to make responsible decisions, but always keeping the eye on how to accelerate. And in terms of the cost structure, I would imagine you have some token costs, token usage, you pay for the data sets. Yeah. You have some hosting, of course. What's the normalized gross margin here? Yeah, the intelligence layer is something we build ourselves. The data, that's a fixed cost, that's a fixed overhead cost. We don't see. I'm not worried about gross margin. In the general sense, when you're looking at AI companies, 90% of the revenue goes to tokens. We are nowhere near that. I think Aira, when we scale, we will probably be able to deliver traditional software margins in the 80s or maybe even 90s. But also it depends on where we take the product. If it becomes more of a vibe coding platform and that is scaling more than, who knows? But the product, as it consists today, is more like of a traditional software P&L, I would say. A final question, Daniel, perhaps on the same topic. Do you think that the current cash pile in Aira is enough to take the company to profitability? Yeah. And secondly, optically from the outside at least, it looks like you could have allocated more cash to Aira at the time of the spinoff. Why did you and the other shareholders not decide to do so? We looked at it, and we considered that this is the amount that is reasonable for a venture like this. And we are firm in our belief that this will be enough to take the company to profitability. So it might change, but this is still the view we have. Excellent. And early signs are quite good, I must say. Yeah. So very much looking forward to following you on this new journey, Daniel. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us.