The share price at which the conversion happens, SEK 16, is also worth noting. If Done.ai executes its platform strategy successfully and the stock appreciates, Vilect's previous owners benefit disproportionately from having accepted shares instead of cash. That alignment of incentives matters for retention. Kristoffer Almeland and the Vilect team have a financial reason to make the integration work, not just an employment agreement.

Small, cheap acquisitions don't get much attention in a media landscape obsessed with billion-dollar rounds and massive exits. But companies like Constellation Software in Canada built extraordinary value by making hundreds of small, disciplined acquisitions over decades. Done.ai's approach looks similar in ambition if not yet in scale. The question is whether the Nordic SME market is large enough and fragmented enough to sustain a multi-year acquisition strategy. At fewer than 1x revenue per deal, the math certainly works.

The integration challenge is real though. Connecting recruitment workflows with accounting and payroll systems requires more than just API connections. It requires rethinking how data flows through an organization. If Done.ai can build those connections well enough that a business owner in Oslo can see hiring costs, onboarding timelines, and payroll impact in a single dashboard, the platform becomes genuinely sticky. That's the prize.

Recruitment is one of those processes that small businesses know is important and still manage to do terribly. The typical SME hiring workflow involves a spreadsheet, an inbox, someone's gut feeling, and a LinkedIn search that takes three times longer than it should. It's manual, it's messy, and it's ripe for the kind of AI-driven automation that larger companies have already adopted.

Done.ai, a Stockholm-listed company building an AI-powered operating platform for SMEs, just signed an agreement to acquire 100 percent of Vilect AS, a Norwegian recruitment SaaS provider. The deal values Vilect at NOK 6.5 million enterprise value on a cash and debt-free basis, with the purchase price fully financed through a seller's credit converted into Done.ai shares at SEK 16 per share.

It's a small deal. That's the point. This is the kind of acquisition that doesn't make headlines but reveals a strategy.

Vilect's 2025 revenue was NOK 7.3 million. The enterprise value of NOK 6.5 million represents less than 1x revenue. For a SaaS company with hundreds of Norwegian business customers, thousands of active users, and a cloud-based recruitment platform that captures structured hiring data across the entire recruitment lifecycle, that's astonishingly cheap.

Why so cheap? Vilect is a small company, just six employees at the end of 2025. It serves a specific niche (Norwegian SME recruitment) without the resources to build AI capabilities or expand internationally on its own. Inside Done.ai's broader platform, those limitations disappear. The data, the customers, and the recruitment workflows get plugged into a larger ecosystem that connects hiring with payroll, accounting, CRM, and financial services.

"Every business in a growth phase depends on its ability to hire well," says Staffan Herbst, Done.ai's CEO. "Vilect has built exactly the kind of structured, AI-enabled recruitment platform that modern SMEs need. The cross-selling potential is significant."

Read past the enterprise value and the revenue multiple, and the strategic logic becomes clearer. Vilect doesn't just offer a recruitment tool. It captures and structures hiring data throughout the entire process: job postings, candidate applications, screening decisions, interview outcomes, final selections. That structured dataset is the kind of foundation you need to build meaningful AI features.

Done.ai already offers HR-related functionality and career portal solutions. Adding Vilect's specialized recruitment workflow, with its emphasis on structured data capture, gives the platform a much deeper vertical in HR. Recruitment is the entry point of the employee lifecycle. If you control that, you can build integrations that follow the employee through onboarding, payroll, performance management, and offboarding.

The structured data angle is what separates this from a simple acqui-hire. Vilect has been running recruitment processes for hundreds of companies, generating a continuously expanding dataset that captures how Norwegian SMEs actually hire. That's training data for AI features that could automate screening, predict candidate fit, and optimize job postings, features that would be expensive and slow to build from scratch.

Done.ai's broader ambition extends well beyond recruitment. The company is building what it describes as an "operating platform" for SMEs that connects multiple business functions, including payroll, accounting, financial services, CRM, analytics, and now recruitment, into a single integrated system. Think of it as Salesforce for companies that have 15 employees and no IT department.

The platform play matters because SME software is still remarkably fragmented. A typical small business uses one tool for accounting, another for payroll, a third for customer management, and maybe a shared spreadsheet for recruitment. None of these systems talk to each other. The data lives in silos, which means the business owner has no unified view of operations and certainly no foundation for AI-driven insights.

Done.ai's acquisition strategy is designed to collapse those silos. Each acquisition adds a new functional module to the platform while bringing existing customer relationships. Vilect adds recruitment. Previous integrations added financial services and career portals. The pattern is clear: build through acquisition, integrate through technology, and sell the combined value as a single subscription.

Done.ai buying a Norwegian company from Stockholm is part of a broader trend. Nordic HR tech is consolidating along national borders that, for small businesses, have always felt arbitrary. A six-person company in Bergen and a 30-person company in Stockholm face identical operational challenges. Payroll rules differ, but the workflow problems are the same.

The Nordic SME market is large in aggregate but fragmented by country. Building a cross-border platform requires exactly this kind of acquisition: small, targeted deals that add local customer bases and market-specific expertise to a centralizing platform. Done.ai isn't the only company running this playbook, but the sub-1x revenue multiple suggests it's finding deals at attractive prices.

The recruitment industry is entering what Done.ai calls a "phase of structural change" driven by AI. Large enterprises have already adopted AI screening tools, automated interview scheduling, and predictive hiring analytics. SMEs haven't, mostly because the tools designed for large companies are too expensive and too complex for a business with 20 employees.

Vilect's founder, Kristoffer Almeland, says joining Done.ai "enables us to accelerate that ambition. Together we can offer SMEs a broader operating platform that connects recruitment with finance and operational management." The transaction is expected to close in the coming weeks.

For a NOK 7 million deal, this won't move markets. But it's the kind of quiet, strategically coherent acquisition that builds real platforms. Done.ai is assembling the building blocks of an operating system for Nordic small businesses, one cheap deal at a time. If the AI features the combined data enables actually work, the platform play gets very interesting very fast.

The stock-based payment structure reveals something about both companies' confidence in the deal. Vilect's owners accepted Done.ai shares rather than cash, which means they're betting the combined entity will be worth more than the current share price implies. For Done.ai, the all-stock structure preserves cash for operations and future acquisitions. It's a financing approach that lets a small public company punch above its weight in M&A.

There's a timing element that makes this acquisition smarter than it looks. AI tools are about to make recruitment dramatically more efficient for companies that have clean, structured hiring data. Companies without that data foundation will be left using generic AI tools trained on someone else's patterns. By acquiring Vilect's structured dataset now, before AI-powered recruitment goes mainstream, Done.ai is buying a competitive advantage at pre-AI prices. The data moat gets wider the longer Vilect operates within the Done.ai ecosystem, with every new recruitment process adding to the training corpus.

Watch the cross-selling metrics over the next two quarters. If Vilect's existing customers start adopting Done.ai's financial and operational tools, the acquisition thesis will be validated quickly. If they don't, it was just a cheap talent acquisition with a recruitment tool bolted on. The difference between a platform company and a holding company is whether the pieces actually fit together. Done.ai's next earnings report will tell you which one it is.

The broader Nordic HR tech landscape is increasingly active. Accel-KKR's recent acquisition of Tamigo from Viking Growth showed that global PE firms see value in Nordic HR platforms. Done.ai is playing a different game at a different scale, but the underlying thesis is similar: Nordic HR tech has been undervalued relative to its data quality and customer loyalty. That's starting to change.