Swedish startup Pit may have gained attention for its outrageous social media posts, but it’s also one of Stockholm’s AI startups 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. Now, it’s backed by a16z, which is leading the startup’s $16 million seed round. Stockholm, which is also home to Lovable, is one of the locations where a16z is actively searching for the next European unicorn.
Pit is pursuing enterprise AI with products that aim to learn from customers how they run their businesses and create custom software to automate processes, Pit CEO Adam Jafer told TechCrunch.
Mr. Jafer left Voi last summer after a seven-year tenure during which the company grew to a team of approximately 1,000 employees with operations in 13 countries. From an engineering perspective, Jafer realized that AI is mature enough to be used in enterprises. Initially, he saw an opportunity to replace a simple SaaS tool with an in-house app, but he soon envisioned opportunities beyond Voi.
“The moment that presented the bigger opportunity was when the model was no longer just a chatbot that generated text, but was more agentic and able to do things,” he told TechCrunch. Unlike competitors that offer AI agent building and vibecoding products, Pitt positions itself as an “AI product team as a service.”
Pit is entering a crowded market and wants to differentiate itself by relying on two pillars. One is Pit Studio, which allows company employees to guide processes that can be handled by AI-generated software. Pit Cloud, the startup promises, will deliver software in a way that meets enterprise requirements for governance, authentication, and auditability.
In mid-January, the startup began testing its plans with pilot customers in telecommunications, healthcare, logistics, and other sectors, focusing solely on automating internal processes. “There is no customer interaction or conversational AI, just pure back-office, service and support functions automated. This gives people back time to focus on their core business,” said Jafer.
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The startup is now preparing to scale commercially, but it’s not up to anyone. Pitt is hiring solutions engineers, following the trend of AI companies hiring in-house forward deployment engineers (FDEs) to drive enterprise adoption. The goal, Jafer said, is to meet the expectations of the large customers it targets. “They’re trying to buy results. They want processes to go faster. They want to free up productivity and free up time,” he said.
Jafer said Pitt is not marketing itself as a way to cut jobs or cut jobs. “The theme is about moving people upstream to do things that are more valuable to the business, rather than repetitive back-office tasks.” Success metrics go beyond saving time and money. “Some of it is just improving the quality of work, things like reducing human error.”
But Pitt’s own needs in this regard became controversial a few months ago when Jafer posted on LinkedIn declaring, “Yes, we currently don’t have junior engineers on our team. At Pitt, agents now do most of what junior engineers used to do.”
The post is still visible, but he no longer supports it. “It may have started out that way, but as you scale up you need a good mix,” he said with a smile.
Hjelm predicted the all-male team might also raise some eyebrows. In his post to That clarification was not immediately available from Pitt’s LinkedIn profile, but TechCrunch spoke with a woman who works in communications at Pitt.
But what this photo reflects is a sense of getting the band back together. Voi’s four co-founders have been friends for many years, and three of them are now joining us on this new journey. Hjelm, Jafer, and now Filip Lindvall, Pit’s founding engineer. One of the startup’s engineers, Andreas Hjelm, is none other than the younger brother of Voi CEO Fredrik Hjelm.
Fredrik Hjelm is also listed as a co-founder of Pit, but since he remains Voi’s CEO, his role is likely to be less hands-on for the time being. Voi has been considered a potential IPO candidate since turning profitable in 2024 and ended 2025 on a strong note. But his involvement as a well-connected entrepreneur could still open doors, and it already has at a16z.
In a tweet, Jelm explained how a16z partners Alex Rampel and Gabriel Vazquez ended up leading Pitt’s round. He got to know Ben Horowitz, Gabriel Vasquez, and Jen Carr. “We stayed in touch a few years ago when they came to Stockholm to understand what they could do for European technology. When choosing a partner for Pitt, we didn’t need money to get started, but we wanted the strongest backers we could find. So we chose them and they chose us.”
Mr. Jafer also confirms that Mr. Pitt did not spend much time working with other companies to raise capital, receiving support from Mr. Pitt’s founder himself as well as from Lakestar, American tech executives and wealthy Scandinavian families. This transatlantic cap table confirms the growing interest in AI from Stockholm, which has established itself as one of Europe’s most active startup hubs.
Pitt could also benefit from its European DNA on the sales front. “We’re after industrial products, and there’s a lot of industrial products in Europe,” Jafer said. He also reported that customers appreciate Pitt’s agnostic approach. The company could benefit from the current tailwinds for sovereign technology, especially in key areas, as it has access to a variety of AI and cloud vendors depending on customer preferences.
“The EU model running on EU computing is a top priority for almost every CIO we meet,” said Jafer.
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