Vend Launches AI Native Innovation Unit

Vend has launched a new business unit to accelerate the development of AI-native marketplace experiences.

According to a press release on Vend's website, the new business unit is deliberately set up as a separate track from ongoing development in the verticals and central product organisation, operating "with a high degree of independence to enable rapid experimentation and exploration of fundamentally different marketplace offerings."

Vend says it will use the new unit to accelerate its understanding of AI-driven interfaces that harness flexible and exploratory user journeys, with experimentation happening independently from existing product roadmaps.

Vend did not confirm the size of the new unit, but did reveal it will consist of a "small and agile team" across engineering, product and business personnel. The new unit will not affect financial guidelines or frameworks.

Christian Printzell Halvorsen, CEO at Vend, said:

“AI is changing how users discover and transact, and this initiative allows us to explore and innovate at the frontier of the industry. We have chosen to establish an independent business unit that will explore AI-native marketplaces. This work is centred on developing entirely new types of user experiences, rather than incrementally improving existing ones. The ambition is to move towards more intuitive, agentic journeys, where users can express needs in natural language and seamlessly explore opportunities within a more unified experience.

"At Vend, we are already advancing AI across our verticals and central data and product & tech organisation. This work will continue. Our new independent AI unit will operate with a high degree of autonomy, and focus on building and validating entirely new AI-native experiences while ensuring that successful concepts can be efficiently integrated into Vend’s core business."

Vend, formerly Schibsted Marketplaces, saw real estate revenues jump 15% in Q4 2025, and 13% in 2025 as a whole. The company recently announced a partnership with Roomvo, allowing users to engage in virtual staging environments on its Norwegian subsidiary, the runaway market-leading horizontal platform, Finn. In an episode of the PPW Podcast recorded in 2025, Halvorsen teased the development of "Bob the Builder", a proprietary AI deployed across Vend to improve internal efficiency and product development.