Pit raises $16M seed round led by a16z

Pit, an enterprise artificial intelligence startup based in Stockholm, has secured a $16 million seed funding round. The investment was led by a16z, a major US venture capital firm. Pit is led by the co-founders of European scooter giant Voi, including Voi CEO Fredrik Hjelm and Pit CEO Adam Jafer. Jafer previously completed a seven-year tenure at Voi, during which the scooter company scaled into a team of nearly 1,000 employees operating in 13 countries.

The startup positions itself as an AI product team as a service. According to Jafer, Pit is going after enterprise AI with products intended to learn from clients and create custom software to automate processes. In mid-January, the startup started testing its plan with pilot customers in telecom, healthcare, logistics, and other sectors. Jafer noted that the startup is focusing on internal operations rather than customer-facing conversational AI. “Nothing customer facing, no conversational AI, just pure back-office, service, and support functions that we turn into automations so that you can give back time to people to focus on your core business,” Jafer said. He also attributed the company’s direction to models becoming more agentic, meaning they can perform actions rather than just generate text. Jafer stated that Pit is not pitching itself as a way to reduce human labor and cut jobs, but rather to move people upstream to do more valuable work.

Despite its commercial focus, Pit has faced scrutiny over its hiring practices and social media presence. The startup gained notice for rage-bait social media posts. This includes a LinkedIn post by Jafer declaring that Pit’s team had no junior engineers because AI agents now perform most of their tasks, though he has since clarified that a mix of experience is needed as the company scales. Additionally, co-founder Fredrik Hjelm addressed concerns on social media regarding the startup being founded by tech bros, clarifying that the team also includes female employees.

The startup’s funding highlights a growing transatlantic interest in European enterprise AI. Alongside lead investor a16z, investors in Pit include Lakestar. This transatlantic backing comes as Voi, which went profitable in 2024 and closed 2025 with strong results, has been considered a potential IPO candidate. Pit plans to leverage its European roots to target industrial clients, utilizing an agnostic approach to AI and cloud vendors. This positioning aligns with demand for sovereign tech, which refers to technology compliant with local or EU regulations regarding data and compute. As Jafer noted, EU models running on EU compute is top of mind for almost every CIO they meet.

Why it matters

Pit’s funding highlights the continued strength of the Stockholm tech ecosystem and the growing transatlantic appetite for European enterprise AI startups.