After 15 years working as an electrician and in different roles with contractors, he knew what the job really looked like. Long days on the road, back to back customer visits, followed by evenings spent catching up on quotes, paperwork, and admin that never quite fit into the day. It was not just frustrating, it was inefficient, and it was costing more than time.
Despite having a master’s degree, it was not academia that gave him clarity. It was the field. Tradespeople were not lacking skill or ambition. They were working with tools that had not kept up with how they actually operate.
That perspective was shaped early. Growing up in Leirfjord in Northern Norway, in a practical family, Håvard was surrounded by people who built and fixed things. From an early age he was taking things apart, wiring simple setups, and understanding how systems worked. That led him into electrical studies, an apprenticeship in an industrial environment, and later into engineering and a master’s degree in electrical power engineering.
Before starting Kobbr, he also experienced scaling a company from the inside as part of the early team at Elaway, working across sales, product, and operations. But across both his own experience and what he saw across the industry, one problem kept repeating itself. The way contractors priced, communicated, and won work was still manual, fragmented, and inefficient.
That opportunity became Kobbr.
For most tradespeople, quoting is still built around Excel, PDFs, and manual handovers. A single project manager can spend up to 60 hours a month, nearly 35% of their time, just creating quotes. That is time not spent with customers, and often the difference between winning and losing work.
Kobbr changes that. It allows contractors to create, send, and close quotes instantly while still on site. Instead of static documents, customers receive a clear, branded digital experience where they can review and accept offers immediately. The result is a faster, more seamless sales process with less back and forth.
The impact is measurable. Teams are saving around 5 hours per week per employee, while faster response times are increasing conversion rates. What used to take hours now happens in minutes equivalent to adding more than 13% productive time per employee, without increasing headcount.
Kobbr operates at the most critical point in the workflow, before the job is signed. While most industry software focuses on execution and invoicing, Kobbr sits at the revenue layer, helping contractors win more work, not just manage it.
This has translated into strong early traction. Kobbr is approaching 300 paying companies, with close to 8 million NOK in annual recurring revenue and continued growth into 2026. Engagement is high, with 55 percent of users active at least 3 days per week, indicating that the product is becoming part of daily operations.
Partnerships have played an important role in this growth. Collaboration with industry players like Sonepar Norway has validated the need for change, while partnerships such as EL-PROFFEN have helped drive adoption among contractors.
The partnership with Nimlas is particularly significant. Nimlas is a decentralised group of more than 140 installation companies across Sweden, Finland, and Norway, with over 5,000 professionals. Establishing Kobbr as the quoting and sales workflow tool for electricians within this network is a key strategic step. From there, the opportunity expands naturally into other trades within the same ecosystem, including plumbers, carpenters, HVAC, and other craftsmen who face the same challenges.
This creates a clear path from a focused entry point to a broader multi-trade platform, scaling within existing customer networks while solving a shared problem across the industry.
That expansion is already underway. While Norway has been the starting point, Sweden represents a significantly larger opportunity. The electrical installation market in Sweden is significantly larger than Norway, estimated at well over 100 billion NOK, compared to roughly 70–80 billion NOK in Norway, with several times more companies operating in the market. The same fragmented workflows exist, but at a much larger scale. Kobbr’s success in Norway has proven the model. The move into Sweden is a natural next step, applying a validated solution in a larger market with greater growth potential. Early customers are already using Kobbr beyond Norway, as the company begins to scale internationally.
At its core, Kobbr is about giving time back. Time to focus on customers, close more deals, and run a better business without being buried in admin.
The vision is simple. Tradespeople should spend more time on the job, where the real value is created, and less time dealing with paperwork.
Kobbr is building towards that future.
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