About Skimle

Like many others, we got excited by AI's potential in 2023 and 2024. Large language models were advancing rapidly. The hype suggested AI would soon handle any task.

But our personal experiences told a different story:

• Henri (Professor at Aalto University) was using AI for qualitative research—but got hallucinations, superficial insights, no traceability.
• Olli (McKinsey Partner) was helping enterprises adopt AI—but most use cases failed to deliver ROI.
• Kalle (award-winning designer) was using AI for customer insights—but couldn't get depth beyond surface summaries.
• Ilia (experienced software engineer) was building AI features—but users didn't connect with generic AI chats.

We became convinced that to get value from AI, you need quality:

1. Rigorous expert-designed workflows (not simple LLM wrappers or RAG databases)
2. Human expertise in the driver's seat (not black-box "AI slop" requiring manual review)

In late 2024, the Finnish government approached Henri with a problem: they needed to analyze 400+ pages of policy consultation responses. They knew manual analysis would take months and were keen to try to use AI, but the basic LLMs and RAG-systems they tried could not produce high quality, transparent analysis.

They needed something that didn't exist. We built it. The first version of Skimle processed those 400 consultation responses systematically, maintaining full traceability from every insight to source quotes. Government analysts could defend their findings and decision-makers could trust the methodology.

After the Finnish government success, academic researchers contacted us. They faced the same problem: NVivo and MAXQDA required weeks of manual work. ChatGPT lacked rigor. They needed Skimle's approach combining rigor with speed.

Then consultants became interested. Then market and customer researchers. Then legal teams.

In November 2025 Henri and Olli left their full-time positions (academia and consulting) to build Skimle full-time. We raised funding from private investors and Finnish government innovation grants to bring on a team of software engineers.

Today we have researchers at 10+ universities, policy analysts across EU governments, consultants at leading firms, market research professionals and hundreds of other users who tap into Skimle for systematic qualitative analysis.

Our mission is to build the definitive platform for qualitative analysis—combining the rigor of academic methods with the speed of AI. Every consultant, researcher, analyst, and knowledge worker should have tools as powerful for text data as Excel is for numerical data.

Our guiding belief is that AI should amplify human expertise, not replace it. The future isn't "AI does 90% quality analysis." It's "AI handles mechanical work so experts can think deeper and reach 200% quality"