Stockholm-based Pit has raised a $16 million seed round led by a16z, putting the cofounders of European scooter operator Voi back in business with an enterprise AI play. The round is led by a16z partners Alex Rampell and Gabriel Vasquez, with Lakestar, US tech executives and Nordic family offices also participating. Three of Voi's four original cofounders — CEO Fredrik Hjelm, Pit CEO Adam Jafer and founding engineer Filip Lindvall — are reunited on the cap table.
Jafer left Voi last summer after a 7-year run during which the scooter company scaled to nearly 1,000 employees operating across 13 countries. Voi went profitable in 2024, closed 2025 with strong results, and is widely viewed as an IPO candidate, which means Hjelm's role at Pit will be less hands-on while he keeps running the day job. The rest of the founding team is drawn from iZettle and Klarna engineering alumni.
Pit positions itself as an "AI product team as a service" rather than another agent-builder or vibe-coding tool. The company sells two products: Pit Studio, where enterprise employees walk the system through processes that should be automated, and Pit Cloud, which runs the resulting custom software with the governance, certifications and audit trails large buyers demand. The pitch is that Pit learns how a client's business actually operates, then ships bespoke software to automate it.
Key facts
- 01Pit raised a $16 million seed round led by a16z partners Alex Rampell and Gabriel Vasquez.
- 02Three of Voi's four cofounders — Fredrik Hjelm, Adam Jafer and Filip Lindvall — are now building Pit.
- 03CEO Adam Jafer left Voi last summer after a 7-year tenure that scaled the scooter firm to nearly 1,000 employees across 13 countries.
- 04Pit started piloting in mid-January 2026 with customers in telecom, healthcare and logistics.
- 05The round also drew Lakestar, US tech executives and Nordic family offices.
"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," Jafer said. He started piloting that thesis in mid-January with customers in telecom, healthcare, logistics and other sectors, deliberately steering away from anything customer-facing. "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."
“Three of Voi's four cofounders are now at Pit, which raised $16M from a16z to build custom back-office automation for European industrials.”— Jaeden Schafer
The commercial model is outcome-based and high-touch. Pit is hiring solution engineers in the forward-deployed mold popularized by larger AI labs, embedding them with clients to drive adoption. "They're looking to buy outcomes. They want processes to go faster. They want to see productivity unlock and time unlock," Jafer said.
Jafer is careful not to frame Pit as a headcount-reduction tool. "The theme is more around moving people upstream to do more valuable things for the business, rather than repetitive back-office work," he said, adding that quality gains and fewer human errors matter as much as cost savings. That tone is a notable shift from a LinkedIn post he made a few months ago declaring Pit had no junior engineers because agents had replaced them. He no longer stands by that line: "It may have started like that, but you need a good mix as you scale."
Hjelm pre-empted criticism of the team's composition in an X post, writing Pit was "founded by tech bros, from Voi and Klarna" before adding "We have tech girls on the team as well, fyi." The optics are a sideshow next to the cap table. Hjelm has explained that he met 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" and stayed in touch — when Pit came together, the founders picked a16z over running a competitive process.
The European angle is also a sales argument. Jafer said Pit is targeting industrials, of which Europe has plenty, and that its agnostic stance on AI and cloud vendors plays well with sovereign-tech-conscious buyers. "EU models running on EU compute is top of mind for almost every CIO we're meeting," he said. That positioning lets Pit pitch against US-headquartered enterprise AI vendors without having to win a model war.
Stockholm has become one of a16z's most-watched European hunting grounds, home to Lovable and now Pit. The skeptic's case writes itself: "AI product team as a service" is a category crowded with consultancies repackaging GPT wrappers, and outcome-based pricing is famously hard to enforce when the work is bespoke. Pit's $16M and four months of pilots aren't yet evidence that the model scales beyond a tight founder network.
What Pit does have is the rarest commodity in European enterprise AI: a founding team that already built and scaled a multi-country operations business, plus a top-tier US firm willing to lead the round on relationship rather than auction. If Pit converts even a handful of European industrial CIOs into reference customers, it becomes the obvious answer to the sovereign-AI question those buyers keep asking — and a16z's bet on Stockholm gets a second proof point after Lovable.
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