Former Voi founders raise $16 million for AI startup Pit

Swedish startup Pit has raised $16 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) for its enterprise AI platform. The company is led by co-founders of European scooter giant Voi, including CEO Fredrik Hjelm, alongside former engineers from iZettle and Klarna.

Pit represents another promising AI startup emerging from Stockholm, joining companies like Lovable in the city’s growing tech ecosystem. The company aims to learn how businesses operate and create custom software to automate internal processes, positioning itself as an “AI product team as a service” rather than offering standard AI agent-building tools.

Adam Jafer, who left his role at Voi last summer after seven years, founded Pit after seeing AI mature enough for widespread enterprise use. During his time at Voi, he watched the company scale to nearly 1,000 employees across 13 countries and recognized opportunities to replace software tools with AI-generated applications.

“The aha moment for the bigger opportunity was when the models were no longer just chatbots that generate text, but became more agentic and could do things,” Jafer explained. His vision extends beyond simple automation to complete process transformation within enterprises.

The startup’s approach centers on two main products:

• Pit Studio: Allows enterprise employees to guide the system through processes that could be handled by AI-generated software
• Pit Cloud: Delivers that software while meeting enterprise requirements for governance, certifications, and auditability

Since mid-January, Pit has been testing with pilot customers across telecom, healthcare, logistics, and other sectors. The focus remains strictly on internal process automation. “Nothing customer facing, no conversational AI, just pure back-office, service, and support functions that we turn into automations,” Jafer said.

The company is hiring solution engineers to work directly with large enterprise clients, following the trend of AI companies deploying forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) to drive adoption. Jafer emphasizes that success metrics go beyond time and cost savings to include work quality improvements and error reduction.

Pit has faced some controversy over its hiring practices and team composition. Jafer previously posted on LinkedIn that the team had no junior engineers because “agents now do most of what junior engineers used to do.” He has since walked back that stance, acknowledging the need for a balanced team as the company scales.

The founding team reflects a “getting the band back together” approach, with three of Voi’s four co-founders now involved in Pit: Hjelm, Jafer, and Filip Lindvall as founding engineer. Andreas Hjelm, one of the startup’s engineers, is Fredrik Hjelm’s brother.

Fredrik Hjelm remains CEO of Voi, which went profitable in 2024 and is considered a potential IPO candidate. His involvement in Pit helped secure the a16z investment after relationships built when the venture firm visited Stockholm to understand European tech opportunities.

The funding round also included backing from Lakestar, American tech executives, and wealthy Nordic families. This transatlantic investor base reflects growing interest in Stockholm’s AI ecosystem and the city’s position as one of Europe’s most active startup hubs.

Pit’s European roots may prove advantageous in sales, particularly with industrial clients common in Europe. The company takes an agnostic approach to AI and cloud vendors, adapting to client preferences. This flexibility aligns with growing demand for sovereign technology solutions, especially in critical sectors.

“EU models running on EU compute is top of mind for almost every CIO we’re meeting,” Jafer noted, highlighting how regulatory and security concerns are shaping enterprise AI adoption across Europe.