The new AI startup from the founders of Voi has become the latest rising star from Pete Stockholm

Swedish startup Pete It may have gotten attention for some angry social media posts, but it’s also become another Stockholm AI startup to watch.

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 it’s now backed by a16z, which led the startup’s $16 million round. Stockholm, Lovable is also homeIt is one of the places where a16z is actively looking for the next European unicorn.

Pit CEO Adam Jafer told TechCrunch that it uses enterprise artificial intelligence with products that aim to learn from customers how their businesses work and create custom software to automate processes.

Jafer left Voi last summer after a seven-year stint where the company grew into a team of nearly 1,000 employees operating in 13 countries. From an engineering perspective, Jafer saw AI maturing enough for enterprise use. Initially, he saw a chance to replace low-dependency SaaS tools with in-house applications, but soon envisioned an opportunity outside of Voi.

“The aha moment for the bigger opportunity was when models were no longer just text-generating chatbots, but more agencies and could do anything,” she told TechCrunch. Unlike competitors that offer AI agent creation or vibe-coding products, Peet bills 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 allows enterprise employees to guide it through processes that can be driven by AI-powered software; and Pit Cloud, which the startup promises, provides this software in a way that meets enterprise requirements for management, certification and auditability.

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

The startup is now preparing to expand commercially, but it won’t be available. AI companies hiring trend advanced engineers (FDEs) to position themselves to drive enterprise adoption, Pete also hires solution engineers. According to Jafer, the goal is to meet the expectations of the large customers it targets. “They want results. They want processes to go faster. They want to unlock productivity and unlock time,” he said.

Jafer said there is no way Peet is reducing human labor and cutting jobs. “The theme is more about moving people upwards to do things of greater value to the business than repetitive back-office work.” Success metrics also go beyond saving time and money. “Some are improving the quality of work, reducing human errors, etc.

Again, Pete’s own needs in this matter were a point of contention a few months ago Jafer wrote on LinkedIn “Yeah, we don’t have a junior engineer on our team right now. Agents in the pit now do a lot of what junior engineers do.”

Although the post is still visible, it doesn’t stop there anymore. “It may have started that way, but when you’re scaling up, you need a good mix,” he says with a smile.

Hjelm expected the all-male team might raise eyebrows as well. a Type in Xhe wrote that Pit was “built by the tech bros from Voi and Klarna,” but immediately added, “There are tech girls on the team too, fyi.” Although TechCrunch spoke with a woman who works for Pete on the communications side, that clarification was not immediately clear from Pete’s LinkedIn profile.

What the image conveys is the feeling of the group coming back together. Voi has four co-founders remained friends over the yearsand 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’s CEO Fredrik Hjelm’s brother.

Although Fredrik Hjelm is also named as Pete’s co-founder, he is still Voi’s CEO, so his role will be less practical for now. Voi is considered after earning in 2024 a potential IPO candidateand It closed 2025 with strong results. But his presence as a well-connected entrepreneur could still open doors – and with the a16z, it already has.

a tweetHjelm explained how his a16z partners, Alex Rampell and Gabriel Vasquez, were leading the way through Pete’s round. 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 technology. We got in touch. When it came to choosing partners for Pit, we didn’t need money to go, but we wanted the strongest backers we could find. So we chose them.”

Jafer also confirmed that Pit did not spend much time with other firms to raise its turnover, which was supported by Pit’s founders themselves, as well as Lakestar, executives of American technology companies and wealthy families from the Nordics. This transatlantic cap chart confirms the growing interest in artificial intelligence in 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’re going after industries, and Europe has a lot of that,” Jafer said. He also reported that customers appreciate Pete’s agnostic approach. It can benefit from this as it can use different AI and cloud vendors depending on customers’ preferences current tailwinds for sovereign technologyespecially in critical sectors.

“EU models that work in EU computing are the focus of almost every CIO we meet,” said Jafer.