Swedish startup Pit may have gained notice for some rage-bait social media posts, but it has also become another Stockholm AI startup to watch.

Pit is led by the cofounders of European scooter giant Voi including Voi CEO Fredrik Hjelm. He is joined by former iZettle and Klarna engineers. And it is 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 intended to learn from the clients how their businesses run then create 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 scaled into a team of nearly 1,000 employees operating into 13 countries. From his engineering viewpoint, Jafer saw how AI has matured enough for enterprise use. Initially, he saw a chance to replace low-hanging SaaS tools with in-house apps, but he soon envisioned an opportunity beyond Voi.

“The aha moment for the bigger opportunity was when the models were no longer just chatbots that generate text, but became more agentic and could do things,” he told TechCrunch. Unlike competitors offering AI agent-building or vibe-coding products, Pit positions itself as an “AI product team as a service.”

Pit is entering a crowded market and hopes to differentiate itself by relying on two pillars: Pit Studio, which lets enterprise employees guide it through processes that could be handled by AI-generated software; and Pit Cloud, which, the startup promises, provides that software in a way that meets enterprise requirements on governance, certifications and auditability.

In mid-January, the startup started testing its plan with pilot customers in telecom, healthcare, logistics and other sectors, focusing solely on automating internal processes. “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.

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The startup is now preparing to scale up commercially, but it 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 solution engineers. The goal, Jafer said, is to meet the expectations of the large customers it is targeting. “They’re looking to buy outcomes. They want processes to go faster. They want to see productivity unlock and time unlock,” he said.

Jafer said Pit is not pitching itself as a way to reduce human labor and cut jobs. “The theme is more around moving people upstream 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 quality of work improvement, reducing human errors and so on.”

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

While the post is still visible, he no longer stands by that. “It may have started like that, but you need a good mix as you scale,” he said with a smile.

Hjelm anticipated the all-male team might raise eyebrows, too. In a post on X, he wrote that Pit was “founded by tech bros, from Voi and Klarna,” but immediately added, “We have tech girls on the team as well, fyi.” That clarification wasn’t immediately apparent from Pit’s LinkedIn profile, although TechCrunch has spoken with one woman working at Pit on the communications side.

What the picture does reflect, though, is a sense of getting the band back together. Voi’s four cofounders have remained friends over the years, and 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 CEO Fredrik Hjelm’s brother.

While Fredrik Hjelm is named as a co-founder o

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