Copenhagen AI company Sevren has released what it calls the most efficient AI model ever built in Denmark. The model is named Embla, after the first woman in Norse mythology, because Embla is the first of its kind.
Embla was trained from scratch and is small enough to run on an iPhone. It was trained on 1.5 trillion tokens using the Gefion supercomputer, in Denmark’s largest AI training project to date. In Sevren’s own tests, it delivers a better combination of speed and quality than comparable models from Google, IBM, and Liquid AI, says CEO Mads Aarup Pedersen.
Because it can run directly on a phone, the data stays on the phone. No questions or documents are sent to a data centre, and the model even works in flight mode.
“We have built something that can live on a phone, which no one else has managed to do with the same quality and the same speed. We see that as something unique,”
Mads Aarup Pedersen told Finans on the release
The company announced that Embla runs on a phone, private, offline and free per request. It reported that At 4 bits Embla averages 57.4 on BFCL, IFBench, AA-Omniscience, GPQA and MATH-500 and answers in 1.77 s end to end on an iPhone 18 Pro. In their measurements, the models that scored higher took at least twice as long on the same phone.
For Europe, Not Just Denmark
For the CEO, the launch gets to the heart of why Sevren was started: AI is used by everyone but built by very few.
“AI is used by everyone, but built by very few. We want more European businesses and researchers to be able to build, adapt and control their own AI. That means developing efficient models that do more with less computing power, and making them available for others to build on,”
commented Mads Aarup Pedersen
Embla’s weights are now available on Hugging Face, where anyone can download the model, run it on their own hardware, and check Sevren’s numbers.
The release is a major milestone for the Sevren team, but more is already under way:
“…we are already working on something bigger. Training has already exceeded 102 billlion tokens.”
Mads Aarup Pedersen shared
Sevren recently announced a partnership with DCAI, giving it access to Gefion, Denmark’s sovereign AI supercomputer, including NVIDIA DGX B300 systems powered by Blackwell Ultra GPUs. The team was live on the infrastructure less than a week after signing the agreement. Now the first release of that work is happening.
