Startup Failures in Norway

Norwegian game-based learning platform valued at $7B at IPO—taken private by Goldman Sachs at a 94% discount.

Norway's humanoid robot pioneer quietly dissolved itself into an OpenAI-backed rebrand.

Norway's Arctic data vault startup preserved humanity's knowledge but couldn't preserve itself.

Norwegian bill-payment and mobile banking app raised €18M across a decade but could not find sustainable unit economics in a market dominated by banks that replicated its features for free.

Norway's online grocer retreated from Germany after burning through cash on a market that wasn't ready

IoT for Norwegian fishermen—great tech, wrong culture, wrong waters.

Norwegian engineering quality, Chinese price competition, no winner.

Sensors under salmon cages drowned in unit economics.

Norwegian printed NFC label pioneer that raised $300M over 20 years and filed for bankruptcy without commercial scale.

Oslo's cubesat propulsion startup ran out of capital before smallsat launch demand materialised at scale

Norwegian airline launched into a fuel price storm

Norwegian BNPL startup that listed on NASDAQ at $1.3B and lost 98% of its value as US subprime lease-to-own defaults exploded and the BNPL model collapsed.

Low-cost transatlantic carrier that expanded faster than the model could support and was broken by COVID.

Norwegian process mining AI absorbed into the Microsoft fabric before achieving scale

Norway most successful online grocery raised $390M and expanded to Germany and Finland before pulling back entirely from international markets in a mass layoff spiral.

Norway's neobank competing against Vipps which was owned by the banks it was trying to disrupt