About Cognosic
Cognosic is a Norwegian company built by the University of Bergen researchers who won the national Education Quality Award for higher education in 2023, now bringing Cosmos to universities in the US and Europe.
Universities run programme quality on spreadsheets, course catalogues, and committee memory. Nobody (not programme directors, not QA, not deans) can see the whole curriculum at once. The people who felt this first weren't consultants; they were academics inside a university.
At the University of Bergen, Bjarte Hannisdal and Dario Blumenschein spent eight years treating the curriculum as a research problem: modelling it as a network of outcomes, courses, teaching, and assessment, and testing that model in real programmes, published in peer-reviewed research.
In 2023 the work won the National Education Award. But a methodology validated inside one university helps only that university: the tooling was trapped in academia, and every other institution still ran on documents and memory.
Cognosic was founded to change that: Kristian Haaga built the statistical and AI engine, and Ulrik Granheim joined to take it to market. Today Cosmos is in production at Norwegian universities, and the team is bringing it to institutions preparing for accreditation in the US and Europe, so the visibility that took a decade to build inside one university arrives at yours as a product.
Winner: the National Education Award, 2023
Born at the University of Bergen
In production at Norwegian universities today
Cognosic in brief
What we believe
Not a collection of documents. Outcomes, courses, teaching, and assessment are connected, and a university should be able to see those connections.
AI surfaces structure and explains its reasoning in plain language. Your academics decide. No black boxes in university governance.
Every mechanism in Cosmos is grounded in peer-reviewed work (constructive alignment, learning design, curriculum analytics) and works with Bloom, SOLO, or the taxonomy you already use.
The team
Deep academic research in curriculum design, combined with commercial and technical experience from SaaS and enterprise software.
Founder & CEO
Serial entrepreneur with EdTech experience. Leads business development, investor relations, and go-to-market.
Researcher & Co-founder
Associate Professor at the University of Bergen and winner of the National Education Award (2023). More than a decade pioneering the curriculum-as-network methodology behind Cosmos.
Education Expert & Co-founder
PhD researcher in educational change and learning design. Lead author on peer-reviewed research in Studies in Higher Education. National Education Award (2023).
Co-founder & CPO
PhD in complex systems and statistics. Built the statistical and AI engine at the core of Cosmos. National Education Award (2023).
Chair of the Board & Investor
Roughly thirty years backing and building early-stage technology companies. Chairs the Cognosic board.
Advisors
Advisor · Professor of American Literature, University of North Texas
Professor at UNT since 2007 and author or editor of seven books. Has been directly engaged in modernising both UNT's core curriculum and the English department's undergraduate and graduate programmes. Joins the University of Ljubljana as a visiting U.S. Fulbright Scholar in fall 2026.
Advisor · Head of Partnerships, PMG
Head of Partnerships at PMG after 20+ years at Camelot Strategic Marketing & Media, where as CEO he helped turn a traditional media shop into a leader in integrated marketing and advanced analytics; earlier an executive at Blockbuster and Broadcast.com. Former goalkeeper on the University of Virginia's national-championship soccer team, a passion he keeps up at Premier League grounds.
Cosmos was founded by the University of Bergen researchers behind the curriculum-as-network methodology: Bjarte Hannisdal (Researcher & Co-founder) and Dario Blumenschein (Education Expert & Co-founder), joined by Kristian Haaga (Co-founder & CPO, complex-systems PhD, built the engine) and Ulrik Granheim (Founder & CEO). The board is chaired by Kelly Moulton.
Both, cleanly separated. Cognosic AS is a commercial Norwegian company; Cosmos is its product. The underlying methodology comes from eight years of university research, and the platform is in production at Norwegian universities today. It's a supported product, not an academic prototype.
The methodology is published in peer-reviewed venues, including lead-authored research in Studies in Higher Education, and builds on established frameworks such as constructive alignment and learning-design research. See the research page for the full evidence spine.
Cognosic is a Norwegian company, based in Bergen and subject to GDPR.
Cosmos originates from research conducted at the University of Bergen. The relationship is formalised through a license agreement, and Cosmos is now in production at Norwegian universities.
Whether you're preparing for accreditation or rethinking a programme, the team behind the research is the team you'll meet.
A conversation with the people behind the research (no commitment).
