Competition in the artificial intelligence (AI) coding market continues to hot up. An industry worth around $4.9 billion in 2023 is expected to have grown five times’ over by 2030 according to a recent report from Grand View Research. Businesses and other organizations worldwide are increasingly using AI to do the lion’s share of their coding work, both for internal business processes and customer-facing products and services.

Swedish start-up Pit , which is today announcing it has raised $16 million of funding, is the latest entrant to this market. Its founders believe a focus on scalable deployments can set it apart from peers that haven’t necessarily thought about how to ensure code written with AI can be implemented effectively across the business.

Adam Jafer, Pit’s CEO and co-founder, says the business was born out of his experience at Voi, the micro-mobility company he previously co-founded and helped to run. Voi’s leadership team was an early adopter of AI for coding, developing a series of tools to manage the company’s workflows. But despite some impressive early results, “every deployment was bespoke, fragile and impossible to scale”, Jafer recalls.

He and his co-founders – with backgrounds at companies including Klarna and iZettle – therefore set out to develop something more practical. Pit is intended to be that something – a platform companies can use to bypass the labor-intensive processes that have automatically developed over time. Most companies function with a patchwork of manual workflows, spreadsheets and legacy SaaS tools, Jafer explains, forcing staff to waste time jumping between systems, moving information to the right place and constantly checking nothing has gone wrong.

“Every enterprise knows these friction points exist but fixing them has always seemed harder than working around them,” adds Jafer.

Pit’s value proposition is that individual business users can tell the platform exactly what a particular workflow or process consists of – and how they currently do the work. One this mapping exercise is complete, Pit automatically designs a solution, generating the code required to take over. Users carry out testing and can then deploy the code to take on the workflow they previously had to manage manually.

“It’s not about replacing your people; it’s about giving them back time,” Jafer promises. “As companies grow, this is a way for them to get more done with fewer resources.”

Does it deliver? The early signs are promising, with around a dozen early customers now using Pit in to automate their workflows. These customers include Tre, Stena Recyclying and Kry, with Pit particularly focused on industrial and real economy businesses where AI adoption may have been slower.

There’s certainly plenty of competition. Well-known AI coding apps including Lovable, Cursor and Bolt are all playing in this market – as well as Claude Code. That said, Jafer sees competitors more tuned into deployment as well as development as Pit’s biggest rivals, citing examples including Wonderful, Distyl and Edra, which have all raised significant funding over the past year or so.

Still, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which is leading today’s $16 million fundraising, believes Pit can hold its own in this marketplace. “Every AI company is selling speed,” says general partner Alex Rampell. “Pit is selling speed that holds up for years, secure, governed and built to last. It's a new category.”

Other investors are also enthusiastic, with the round including participation from Lakestar and executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Deel and Revolut. The Stena and Lundin families are also investors in the Stockholm-headquartered company.