Founders of artificial intelligence company Voi’s new startup Pit has become the latest rising star to emerge from Stockholm

Swedish startup Pit may have gotten the attention of some inflammatory social media posts, but it has also become another Stockholm AI startup worth watching.

Pit is led by the co-founders of European scooter giant Voi, including Voi CEO Frederik Helm. He is joined by former iZettle and Klarna engineers. 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 is actively searching for the next European unicorn.

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

Jaffer left Voi last summer after a seven-year tenure during which the company grew into a team of about 1,000 employees working in 13 countries. From his engineering perspective, Jaafar has seen how AI has matured enough to be used in organizations. Initially, he saw an opportunity to replace simple SaaS tools with on-premises applications, but he soon envisioned an opportunity beyond Voi.

“The aha moment of the biggest opportunity was when forms were no longer just chatbots that generated texts, but became more functional and could do things,” he told TechCrunch. Unlike competitors that offer AI agent building or emotion coding products, Pit positions itself as an “AI-as-a-Service product team.”

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

In mid-January, the startup began testing its plan with beta customers in telecommunications, healthcare, logistics and other sectors, focusing solely on automating internal processes. “There’s nothing customer-facing, no conversational AI, just back-office, service and support functions that we automate so you can free up people’s time to focus on your core business,” Jaafar said.

The startup is now preparing to expand commercially, but it will not stop getting involved. Following the trend of AI companies hiring forward deployed engineers (FDEs) to embed themselves to drive enterprise adoption, Pit is also hiring solution architects. Jaafar said that the goal is to meet the expectations of the large customers it targets. “They’re looking to buy results. They want processes to go faster. They want to see productivity take off and open up time,” he said.

Jaafar said Pit does not position itself as a way to reduce human labor and cut jobs. “It’s about moving people up to the top to do more valuable things for the company, rather than repetitive work in the back office.” 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.”

However, Pit’s needs for this became a subject of controversy a few months ago when Jafar 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, it no longer stops there. “It may have started that way, but you need a good mix as you expand,” he said with a smile.

Helm expected the all-male team to raise eyebrows as well. In a post on That clarification wasn’t immediately clear from Pit’s LinkedIn profile, though TechCrunch spoke with a woman who works at Pit on the communications side.

But what the image reflects is the feeling of getting the band back together. Voi’s four founders 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 Helm, is none other than the brother of Voi’s CEO, Fredrik Helm.

While Frederik Helm has been named as co-founder of Pit as well, he is still Voi’s CEO, so his role will likely be less hands-on at the moment. Since turning earnings in 2024, Voi has been considered a potential IPO candidate, and closed out 2025 with strong results. But his involvement as a well-connected businessman could still open doors — and it did, with a16z.

In a tweet, Helm explained how a16z partners Alex Rumble and Gabriel Vazquez ended up leading the pit round. He met Ben Horowitz, Gabriel Vasquez and Jin 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 move forward, but we wanted the strongest backers we could find. So we chose them, and they chose us.”

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

Pit can also benefit from European DNA when it comes to sales. “We are going after industrial industries, and there are a lot of them in Europe,” Jaafar said. He also stated that customers appreciate Pit’s agnostic approach. Since it can use different AI and cloud vendors depending on customer preferences, it can benefit from current sovereign technology tailwinds, especially in critical sectors.

“EU models that drive EU computing are at the forefront of the minds of almost every IT manager we meet,” Jaafar said.