Stockholm-based AI startup Pit has raised a $16 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from venture firm Lakestar, the startup’s own founders, executives from American tech companies, and wealthy families from the Nordics. The round was announced in May 2026.
Pit was co-founded by several alumni of European scooter company Voi, including Voi CEO Fredrik Hjelm and Adam Jafer, who serves as Pit’s CEO. Jafer left Voi in the summer of 2025 after a seven-year tenure during which the company scaled to nearly 1,000 employees across 13 countries. Former engineers from iZettle and Klarna are also on the team. Filip Lindvall, another Voi co-founder, serves as a founding engineer at Pit.
The startup targets enterprise clients with two core products: Pit Studio, which allows enterprise employees to guide the system through processes that could be handled by AI-generated software, and Pit Cloud, which delivers that software with controls around governance, certifications, and auditability. Pit describes its offering as an “AI product team as a service,” focused exclusively on back-office automation rather than customer-facing or conversational AI tools.
Pit began testing with pilot customers in telecom, healthcare, and logistics in mid-January 2026. The company is now preparing to scale commercially and plans to hire solution engineers to work directly with large enterprise clients. Jafer said target customers are “looking to buy outcomes” — faster processes, productivity gains, and reduced human error — rather than headcount reductions.
The a16z connection came through Fredrik Hjelm’s existing relationship with the firm’s partners, built when a16z visited Stockholm to explore European investment opportunities. Hjelm said Pit’s founders sought the strongest backers available rather than raising out of necessity.
Pit’s European base may also be a commercial asset. Jafer noted that industrials represent a key target sector and that clients are increasingly focused on using EU-based AI models running on EU compute — a consideration he said comes up with nearly every CIO the company meets.
Source: TechCrunch