Swedish startup Pit may have gained attention for some outrage-inducing social media posts, but it’s also become another Stockholm AI startup to watch.
Pit is led by the co-founders of European scooter giant Voi, including Voi CEO Fredrik Hjelm. He is joined by former iZettle and Klarna engineers. And now it’s backed by a16z, which led the startup’s $16 million seed round. Stockholm, also home to Lovable, is one of the places where a16z is actively looking for the next European unicorn.
Pit is pursuing business AI with products meant to learn from customers how their businesses work and then build custom software to automate processes, Pit CEO Adam Jafer told TechCrunch.
Jafer left Voi last summer after a seven-year tenure that saw the company scale to a team of nearly 1,000 employees operating in 13 countries. From his engineering perspective, Jafer saw how AI has matured enough for business use. Initially, he saw an opportunity to replace low-end SaaS tools with in-house applications, but soon envisioned an opportunity beyond Voi.
“The moment for the biggest opportunity was when models were no longer just text-producing chatbots, but became more practical and could do things,” he told TechCrunch. Unlike competitors that offer AI agent creation or vibe coding products, Pit positions itself as an “AI product group as a service.”
Pit is entering a crowded market and hopes to differentiate itself by relying on two pillars: Pit Studio, which lets business employees walk it through processes that could be handled by AI-generated software; and Pit Cloud, which, the startup promises, delivers that software in a way that meets business requirements for governance, certifications and auditability.
In mid-January, the startup began testing its plan with pilot customers in telecommunications, healthcare, logistics and other sectors, focusing exclusively on automating internal processes. “There’s nothing customer-facing, no conversational AI, just back-office, service and support functions that we automate so you can give people time to focus on your core business,” Jafer said.
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The fledgling company is now preparing to expand commercially, but it won’t be spontaneous. Following the trend of AI companies hiring future engineers (FDEs) to integrate to drive business adoption, Pit is also hiring solution engineers. The goal, Jafer said, is to meet the expectations of the large customers it targets. “They’re looking to buy results. They want processes to go faster. They want to see productivity unlocked and time unlocked,” he said.
Jafer said the Pit is not pitching itself as a way to reduce human labor and cut jobs. “It’s more about moving people up to do more valuable things for the business, rather than repetitive back-office work.” Success metrics also go beyond saving time and money. “Some of it is just improving the quality of work, reducing human error and so on.”
However, Pit’s needs for this became the subject of controversy a few months ago Jafer posted on LinkedIn stating “Yes, our team currently has no junior engineers. In the Pit, agents now do most of what junior engineers did.”
While the post is still visible, he is no longer standing on it. “It may have started that way, but you need a good mix as you scale,” he said with a smile.
Hjelm expected the all-male team could also raise eyebrows. In one posting on Xwrote that Pit was “founded by tech bros from Voi and Klarna,” but immediately added, “We’ve got tech girls on the team too, fy.” That clarification wasn’t immediately apparent from Pit’s LinkedIn profile, though TechCrunch spoke with a woman who works at Pit on the communications side.
What the image does reflect, however, is the band’s sense of reunion. The four co-founders of Voi have they remained friends over the yearsand three of them are now part of this new journey: Hjelm, Jafer and Filip Lindvall, now a founding engineer at Pit. One of the startup’s engineers, Andreas Hjelm, is none other than Voi’s CEO Fredrik Hjelm’s brother.
While Fredrik Hjelm is also listed as a co-founder of Pit, he is still Voi’s CEO, so his role will likely be less hands-on for now. Since becoming profitable in 2024, Voi has been considered a potential IPO candidate and closed 2025 with strong results. But his involvement as a well-connected entrepreneur could open more doors — and already has, with the a16z.
In one tweetHjelm explained how his a16z partners Alex Rampell and Gabriel Vasquez ended up leading the pit lap. He met Ben Horowitz, Gabriel Vasquez and Jen Kha “a few years ago when they came to Stockholm to figure out what they could do for European technology. We stayed in touch. When it came time to choose partners for the Pit, we didn’t need the money to get started, but we wanted the strongest backers we could find. That’s why we chose them.
Jafer also confirmed that Pit did not spend much time with other companies to raise its circle, which was backed by the founders of Pit themselves, as well as Lakestar, executives from American technology companies and wealthy families from Scandinavia. This transatlantic cap table confirms that there is growing interest in AI outside of Stockholm, which has established itself as one of the most active startup hubs in Europe.
Pit could also benefit from its European DNA in terms of sales. “We’re going after industrial sectors, and there are a lot of them in Europe,” Jafer said. He also said that customers appreciate Pit’s agnostic approach. Since it can use different AI and cloud vendors depending on customer preferences, it could benefit from current headwinds for the dominant technology, especially in critical areas.
“EU models running on EU computers are at the heart of almost every CIO we meet,” Jafer said.
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