About

A small Danish company that finds people in photos, so the law can be answered.

Founded in Copenhagen in 2024. Two engineers, one DPO, one designer. We picked one problem worth doing properly.

The name

Why Ansikt.

Naming a face-search tool is harder than it looks. We wanted a word that was honest about what the tool does, without making it sound like a surveillance product.

ansigt /ˈanˌse̝kd/ · Danish, n.

A face. The forward part of a head. By extension: the part of a thing turned toward the world.

From Old Norse ansikt · "what is seen"

Ansikt /ˈanˌse̝kd/ · the company

Originally a placeholder. We tried fancier names. None of them said what the product was. We kept this one because it does.

Spelled with a k · the original Norse form

01 · Origin

Why this, and why here.

i. The DSAR Spring · 2024

One of us was a DPO at a Danish public-sector agency. A former employee asked, under Article 15, for every photo on file. Standard request. The answer should have taken a day.

It took twenty-three. Six systems, two cloud drives, a SharePoint older than the GDPR itself. Spreadsheets, screenshots, second-guessing. The PDF that finally went out was almost certainly incomplete. Nobody could prove otherwise — including the regulator.

"The law is fine. The tools are missing."

We looked for the tool. The market had two flavours: enterprise face-recognition platforms designed for surveillance, and consumer photo apps designed for grandparents. Nothing in between for a compliance officer with a 30-day clock and seven systems to search.

So we built it.

ii. Why Denmark Copenhagen · ongoing

Denmark takes data protection seriously and quietly. Datatilsynet, our supervisory authority, has issued some of the EU's most pragmatic GDPR guidance — not the loudest, the clearest.

That same disposition shows up in how Danish companies build software: the small things are taken seriously; nothing is decorative; the marketing is dry on purpose. We wanted to build a company in that idiom.

It also means our jurisdiction question is settled before anyone asks it. Ansikt is a Danish ApS, hosted on EU infrastructure, governed by Danish and EU law. That's not a feature. It's the floor.

iii. The shape we picked 2024 — present

A small kit, drawn for one job. Find a person across every system you own. Show your work. Hand the regulator a PDF that makes sense.

We turned down adjacent product opportunities — live CCTV plug-ins, public-internet face search, marketing analytics. Each would have made the company bigger. Each would have made it worse.

The product is narrow on purpose. We'd rather do this one thing well, for a long time, than do five things that someone, somewhere, eventually regrets shipping.

02 · Principles

How we work, in six lines.

Posted on the wall, in Danish. Translated here for the website.

Boring is a compliment.

A compliance product should be predictable, slow to surprise, and quick to answer. We measure ourselves on uptime and latency, not on novelty.

Det kedelige er det fineste

ii.

Show your work.

Every search is logged. Every export is signed. If we can't explain how we got an answer, we won't ship the answer. Auditors and DPOs are the audience.

Vis hvad du har lavet

iii.

Hold less than you have to.

One vector per face. The original photo stays where it lives. We don't make copies, and we delete what we don't need. Article 5(1)(c), as a habit.

Hold mindre end du må

iv.

Don't sell what people are.

No data brokers. No model-training partnerships. No public-internet face search. Your archive is yours. The vectors derived from it are yours. Full stop.

Sælg ikke hvad folk er

A small kit, kept small.

Every feature is asked to defend itself. If it doesn't survive a quarterly cull, it goes. The roadmap is a deletion exercise as often as an addition one.

Et lille værktøj, holdt lille

vi.

Speak plainly.

No "AI-powered." No "next-gen." No grand verbs. We say what the product does, in the smallest words that fit. The product is interesting enough.

Tal klart

03 · The team

Four people, one room.

For now. We grow when the work demands it, not when the calendar does.

Mette Sørensen Co-founder · CEO & DPO

Six years as DPO at a Danish public-sector agency. Wrote the DSAR guide that went out to 14 municipalities. Knows where the bodies are because she helped bury them.

prev. Datatilsynet · Aarhus University

Jonas Lindberg Co-founder · Engineering

Computer vision since the pre-deep-learning days. Built embedding pipelines at two Nordic startups before this. Believes in vector databases the way some people believe in spreadsheets.

prev. Spotify · Unity · DTU

Anika Holm Engineering · Infrastructure

Owns the EU-hosted side. Spent four years writing audit-grade systems for a Copenhagen bank. Will not deploy on a Friday afternoon, no matter how small the change.

prev. Saxo Bank · Tradeshift

Erik Vinter Design & product writing

Type, layout, the words on the buttons. Fights for whitespace and against jargon. Edits the manifesto twice a year, against his will.

prev. Kontrapunkt · Designit

04 · So far

A short timeline. On purpose.

Spring · 2024 The DSAR that didn't fit.

A 23-day search for one person's photos. The spreadsheet that became a company.

Autumn · 2024 Ansikt ApS, registered in Copenhagen.

First commit. First contract: a Copenhagen municipality, paying us to fail in private.

Spring · 2025 First production index.

A 38,000-image archive across SharePoint, Drive and a public website. First real DSAR answered: 0.6 seconds.

Autumn · 2025 URL Proxy + consent management ship.

A school in Aarhus runs the first per-face blur on a class photo. Twenty-three children stay in the picture.

Now Open waitlist.

Eleven organisations on the index. Three more in onboarding. ISO 27001 audit underway.

If you've read this far

We'd rather have one good conversation than ten signups.

If your organisation handles photos and the GDPR question keeps the DPO up at night, we'd like to hear about it. We answer our own emails.

hej@ansikt.dk Join the waitlist