Semine is expanding into Sweden.

The company has already gained significant market share in Norway, and now Semine is going global. Sweden is the first country, and the Norwegian technology company is heavily investing to secure a position and ensure results. The first Swedish customers are already in place

Semine has grown significantly in recent years, and through Norwegian customers, SEMINE is already in use in Poland, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

Now the world will get to know SEMINE fully, and Commercial Director Daniel Karlsen says that Sweden is the first country outside Norway where the Norwegian success establishes its own organization to increase growth.

- We are establishing our own office in Sweden and are already recruiting the first people for a local commercial team. We are in an attractive niche and meet many good candidates who are triggered by the opportunity to work with an actor that is so far ahead in practical, business use of artificial intelligence as Semine is, he says.

He highlights that Semine's competitors in the Swedish market are largely the same as in Norway - with products that do not necessarily meet today's customer needs in the same way that Semine's solutions do.

- The market and customer needs are developing extremely quickly, but most of the solutions delivered today do not keep up with the development. Just like in many other industries, we see that established players have comfortably held market share for several years without a great degree of innovation and without exploiting the full potential of new technology. This is the same experience our customers have, and it is also where we have been the first to open up to doing things completely differently, says Karlsen.

- SEMINE is built around tailor-made artificial intelligence to provide modern finance functions with new opportunities. This opens up for better data capture, more automation, higher quality, and new actionable insights into the business - which in turn provides smarter and better decisions," he says.

Moreover, Sweden is a natural, first export market because several Norwegian Semine partners operate there, and the most commonly used ERP systems are well known from home. Swedish customers - whether in-house finance or accounting functions or external accounting firms - mostly have the same challenges that Semine already helps over 8,500 companies with here in Norway, notes Karlsen.

- Because we have Norwegian customers who use our product in their foreign subsidiaries, the software is already ready to use in several countries. For example, the solution supports multiple languages and only needs minimal adjustments to be used in new markets. Because many of the financial systems are the same, we can easily connect many of the same solutions that are common in Norway, he says.

The goal for Semine is to have established a sales organization in Stockholm during the second quarter of this year, but no one is sitting idle and waiting. The first contracts have already been signed, and work is now underway to implement these customers, with the Swedish solar cell supplier Sesol as one of the freshest. This ambitious company has around 1,000 employees, and the company's CFO, David Scherling, eagerly anticipates what SEMINE can do for him and the company's finance function.

–The main reason why we chose to implement SEMINE is because we have a vision in the finance department to eliminate manual, repetitive tasks and instead focus on exception handling.

The implementation of SEMINE is underway, and we can already see, for example, that the machine learning component will be able to automate our accounts receivable work to a large extent. Our goal is for at least 90 percent of the tasks to be handled automatically," says Scherling.

The good start has made several partners see the opportunities to launch SEMINE for their Swedish customers, and therefore the ambition is for the new organization to be busy in the coming quarters. Karlsen expects SEMINE to embark on another foreign establishment already in the fourth quarter or early next year.

- SEMINE needs to expand internationally to grow at the pace that the company, owners, and management have ambitions for. We will continue to grow in Norway, but the Swedish market is more than twice as large - not to mention the opportunities we see elsewhere in the world. Now that SEMINE has proven its usefulness for customers here at home, we believe that the time has come for CFOs and finance employees in the rest of the world to have the same opportunities," he says.