Twenty years of makingthe complicated simple.
HR software is only worth anything if it creates value for management and employees alike. That has been the standard in every system we have built — and Komma is the one we have dreamed of building, with everything AI now adds.
Before Komma
This is not our first HR system.
The team behind Komma has spent more than twenty years building HR solutions for Nordic companies, and Komma is built on that experience. We always build to our motto, “Simplify the Complicated”, and we design every feature through the user’s eyes. Taking customers along on what we build next, and on how the whole product feels to use, matters to us every time.
In practice that means removing steps rather than adding settings. Naming things the way people say them out loud. Making the default the thing most companies need, so that most companies never have to configure it at all. It is unglamorous work, and it is most of the work.
What none of those earlier solutions could fix on its own was the seam between them. A candidate became an employee and fell into a different system, then a third one for payroll and a fourth for reviews. Every handover was somebody retyping something that was already true. That is the problem Komma was built to remove.
What we carried over
Four habits from twenty years.
Some things we changed completely when we started again. These are the ones we did not.
- Simplify the ComplicatedOur motto, and the test every feature has to pass. If a manager needs training to approve a holiday request, the screen is wrong — not the manager. We would rather cut a feature than add a step to the one people use every week.
- Designed through the user’s eyesWe start from the situation somebody is actually in — an application to answer, a new colleague starting Monday, a pay run to approve — rather than from the fields that need filling in.
- Customers on the advisory sideWhat we build next is decided with the HR teams who use it, not for them. Call with a problem and you get someone who can do something about it, not a ticket number.
- HR data is somebody’s lifeSick leave, pay and review notes are not rows. Access control, retention and traceability belong in the data model, not in a policy document nobody reads.
What we changed
One system, built from the ground up.
Komma is the whole chain. Hire someone in Recruitment and they already exist in Organisation, get an onboarding flow, record time, join the pay run and are assessed in a review — without anyone typing the same thing twice. That takes one shared dataset rather than five systems that have to talk to each other. It is why we built Komma from scratch instead of hanging new modules on something that already existed.
It is also what other HR systems would like to be, and the difference is in the foundation: one data architecture that every module reads from and writes back to. No exports, no nightly files, no copies drifting apart. That is not something a platform can retrofit later.
On top of it sits Karma, an AI assistant built into the platform rather than bolted onto it. Twenty years ago the answer to “this takes too long” was a shortcut key. Today Karma drafts the job ad, summarises the evaluation and spots the absence pattern — and then waits for a person to approve. Same motto, better tools: it takes the tedious part, not the decision.
We had this solution in mind for more than five years. At some point we could not wait any longer, so we built it.
The team
The people behind Komma.
We have done recruitment, onboarding, payroll and development reviews ourselves — and wrestled with the systems meant to support them.
Tell us what to build next.
We take input from the HR teams who use Komma every day — and we would rather hear the objection early than late.