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

Source: TechCrunch

Leadership & Backing

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, and the company is now backed by a16z, which is leading Pit’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.

Product Vision

Pit is going after enterprise AI with products intended to learn from a client’s business processes and then create custom software to automate them, Pit CEO Adam Jafer told TechCrunch.

• Jafer left Voi last summer after a seven‑year tenure during which the company grew to nearly 1,000 employees operating in 13 countries.
• From his engineering viewpoint, Jafer saw that AI had matured enough for enterprise use.
• “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 said.

Unlike competitors offering AI‑agent‑building or vibe‑coding products, Pit positions itself as an “AI product team as a service.”

Core Pillars

In mid‑January, Pit began 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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Hiring & Go‑to‑Market Strategy

Pit is preparing to scale commercially, but it won’t be hands‑off. Following the trend of AI companies hiring forward‑deployed engineers (FDEs) to embed themselves and drive enterprise adoption, Pit is also hiring solution engineers.

“They’re looking to buy outcomes. They want processes to go faster. They want to see productivity unlock and time unlock,” Jafer explained.

Jafer emphasized that 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 therefore go beyond saving time and money, including quality‑of‑work improvement and reducing human errors.

Controversies

• A few months ago, 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.”

  The post is still visible, but Jafer now says, “It may have started like that, but you need a good mix as you scale,” with a smile.

• Hjelm anticipated the all‑male team might raise eyebrows. In a post on X, he wrote that Pit was “founded by tech bros, from Voi and Klarna,” but 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.

The “Band Back Together”

Voi’s four co‑founders have remained friends over the years, and three of them are now part of this new journey:

• Fredrik Hjelm (Voi CEO) – co‑founder of Pit (still CEO of Voi, likely less hands‑on).
• Adam Jafer – Pit CEO.
• Filip Lindvall – founding engineer at Pit.

One of Pit’s engineers, Andreas Hjelm, is Fredrik Hjelm’s brother.

Since becoming profitable in 2024, Voi has been considered a potential IPO candidate and closed 2025 with strong results. Hjelm’s involvement as a well‑connected entrepreneur could still open doors — and already has, with a16z.

In a tweet, Hjelm explained how a16z partners Alex Rampell and Gabriel Vasquez ended up leading Pit’s round:

“I became acquainted with Ben Horowitz, Gabriel Vasquez and Jen Kha a few years ago when they came to Stockholm to understand what they could do for European tech. We stayed in touch. When it came to picking partners for Pit, we didn’t need the money to get going, but we wanted the strongest backers we could find. So we picked them, and they picked us.”

Jafer also noted that Pit’s round was backed by the founders themselves, Lakestar, executives from American tech companies, and wealthy Nordic families, highlighting growing European interest in AI.

Pit could also benefit from its European DNA when it comes to sales. “We’re going after industrials, and there’s plenty of that in Europe,” Jafer said. He reported that clients appreciate Pit’s agnostic approach, as it can use different AI and cloud vendors depending on preferences, aligning with the current tailwinds for sovereign tech.

“EU models running on EU compute is top of mind for almost every CIO we’re meeting,” Jafer said.

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About the Author

Anna Heim – writer and editorial consultant

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• Freelance reporter at TechCrunch since 2021
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