Voi founders’ new AI startup Pit has become the latest rising star out of Stockholm

Swedish startup Pit may have been noticed by some angry social media posts, but it has 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 it’s now backed by a16z, which is leading the startup’s $16 million seed round. Stockholm, also home to Lovable, is one of the places where a16z has been actively looking for the next European unicorn.

Pit is going after enterprise AI with products aimed at learning from customers how their businesses run and then creating custom software to automate processes, Pit CEO Adam Jafer told TechCrunch.

Jafer left Voi last summer after a seven-year tenure, during which the company grew to a team of nearly 1,000 employees, operating in 13 countries. From his technical perspective, Jafer saw how AI has matured enough for business use. Initially he saw an opportunity to replace low-hanging SaaS tools with in-house apps, but soon saw an opportunity beyond Voi.

“The aha moment for the bigger opportunity was when the models stopped being just chatbots that generated text and became more agentic and could do things,” he told TechCrunch. Unlike competitors offering products for building AI agents or vibe coding, Pit is positioning itself as an “AI product team as a service.”

Entering a crowded market, Pit hopes to differentiate itself by relying on two pillars: Pit Studio, which allows enterprise employees to guide the company through processes that can be handled by AI-generated software; and Pit Cloud, which, the startup promises, will deliver 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 telecom, healthcare, logistics and other industries, focusing solely on automating internal processes. “No customer centricity, no conversational AI, just pure back office, service and support functions that we turn into automations so you can give people time to focus on your core business,” said Jafer.

The startup is now preparing to scale up commercially, but that won’t be hands-off. Following the trend of AI companies hiring forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) to embed themselves to drive enterprise adoption, Pit is also hiring solutions engineers. The goal, Jafer said, is to meet the expectations of the major customers it targets. “They want to buy results. They want processes to be faster. They want productivity and time to be unlocked,” he said.

Jafer said Pit is not positioning itself as a way to reduce human labor and eliminate jobs. “The theme is more about moving people upstream to do more valuable things for the company, rather than repetitive back-office work.” Success metrics also go beyond saving time and money. “Some of it is just about improving the quality of work, reducing human error and so on.”

Yet Pit’s own needs in this regard became a subject of controversy a few months ago Jafer posted a message on LinkedIn stating “Yes, our team currently has no junior engineers. At Pit, agents now do most of what junior engineers used to do.”

Although the post is still visible, he is no longer behind it. “It may have started that way, but you need a good mix as you scale up,” he said with a smile.

Hjelm expected the all-male team to raise eyebrows as well. In one message on Xhe wrote that Pit was “founded by techbros, from Voi and Klarna,” but immediately added: “We also have techgirls on the team, fyi.” That clarification wasn’t immediately clear from Pit’s LinkedIn profile, although TechCrunch spoke to a woman who works at Pit on the communications side.

What the photo does reflect is the feeling of the band getting back together. The four co-founders of Voi did that have remained friends over the yearsand three of them are now part of this new journey: Hjelm, Jafer and Filip Lindvall, now one of the founders of Pit. One of the startup’s engineers, Andreas Hjelm, is none other than the brother of Fredrik Hjelm, CEO of Voi.

While Fredrik Hjelm is also listed as Pit’s co-founder, he is still Voi’s CEO, so his role will likely be less hands-on for now. Since Voi became profitable in 2024, it has been considered a potential IPO candidate ended 2025 with strong results. But his involvement as a well-connected entrepreneur could still open doors – and he has already done so, at a16z.

In one tweetHjelm explained how a16z partners Alex Rampell and Gabriel Vasquez ultimately led Pit’s lap. He was introduced to Ben Horowitz, Gabriel Vasquez and Jen Kha “a few years ago when they came to Stockholm to understand what they could do for European technology. We stayed in touch. When it came to choosing partners for Pit, we didn’t need the money to get started, but we wanted the strongest backers we could find. So we chose them, and they chose us.”

Jafer also confirmed that Pit did not spend much time with other companies to raise its round, which was also supported by Pit’s founders themselves, as well as Lakestar, executives from US tech companies and wealthy families from the Nordic countries. This transatlantic cap table confirms that there is growing interest in AI from Stockholm, which has consolidated itself as one of the most active startup hubs in Europe.

Pit could also benefit from its European DNA when it comes to sales. “We are going for the industrial sector, and there is plenty of that in Europe,” Jafer said. He also reported that customers like Pit’s agnostic approach. Because it can use different AI and cloud vendors depending on customer preferences, it could benefit from the current tailwinds for state technology, especially in critical sectors.

“EU models running on EU computers are a top priority for almost every CIO we meet,” says Jafer.