About
Two people who have seen this problem from both sides
Talno is built by one person working inside frontier model evaluation, and one who builds the systems that make assessment work at scale.
Why
Why we are building this from Oslo
The market for assessed human expertise sold to AI labs is served almost entirely from San Francisco. That works poorly for European specialists, who end up engaged under rules the supplier was not built for, and poorly for the labs, who get thinner access to Nordic and European expertise than they should.
We think the sequence is the one micro1 and Mercor both ran: the assessment work acquires and qualifies scarce expertise, recruiting proves it works and pays for it, and supplying that expertise is where the business goes. The difference is that we are building it from Oslo.
We start with specialist hiring for Nordic companies. Every assessment adds to our pool of vetted experts and improves the engine, and that pool is what we supply to AI labs.
The team
The founders
Saleh Abbas
Co-founder and CEO
Led Flat6Labs Bahrain, one of the leading early-stage investors in the Middle East and North Africa, and was COO of the largest of its 50 portfolio companies, a 45-person AI edtech firm, through a turnaround. He also does model evaluation and data annotation for a frontier AI lab as a contracted expert, which is where the second half of this business came from.
Tord Nikolai Stang
Co-founder and CTO
Full-stack developer and data scientist with nine years of experience, specialising in large language models and data processing. He has worked as a data analyst and built several apps with predictive and assessment models, the core skill behind Talno's assessment engine.
Principles
What we hold to
- 01
Assessment, not keyword matching
We test what people actually know against what the work requires, and the reasoning is visible to whoever has to use it.
- 02
Built where the expertise is
Nordic technical fields are not reachable from a marketplace run out of another time zone. We are in the market.
- 03
In jurisdiction
European experts are engaged under European rules, with their data handled accordingly.
- 04
A person on every shortlist
The AI searches, assesses and ranks. A person reviews every shortlist before it leaves us, and the decision stays with the client.
Contact
Tell us what you need
We answer every enquiry. If we are not the right choice for you, we will say so.