Legendary venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is backing the artificial intelligence-native “product team-as-a-service” startup Pit in its first major funding round.

It served as the lead investor in the $16 million round, announced today. It also saw participation from Lakestar and senior executives from AI giants OpenAI Group PBC and Anthropic PBC, as well as Google LLC, Revolut Group Holdings Ltd. and Deel Inc.

Pit, which is officially known as Pitdotcom Sweden AB, has developed a platform that aims to replace the jumbled mass of spreadsheets, email inboxes and software-as-a-service tools that most enterprises run on today. Its AI product team-as-a-service platform makes it possible for teams to build and deploy customized, production-grade software to power their internal business operations.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Adam Jafer (pictured, third from right) told SiliconANGLE that the spreadsheets and SaaS software commonly used by enterprises today was never designed for the way they actually get work done. Because companies are forced to use a patchwork of tools, most enterprise workloads are incredibly fragmented, requiring lots of manual work and switching of tabs to get things done.

Pit aims to replace this patchwork with an AI-native software layer that’s able to learn an organization’s workflows so its teams can work faster and more efficiently. Users simply describe a business need – such as an operations, financial or customer workflow – then explain what the existing process looks like, and the platform will translate that into a customized software application that can be deployed instantly.

“For 20 years, enterprises have rented software that forces them to operate around it,” Jafer said. “With AI, that ends. For the first time, every company can run on systems they actually designed themselves.”

Pit’s platform has two core components. Pit Studio is the main development portal, which is designed to learn how companies work and build the systems that run those operations. Then there’s Pit Cloud, which provides the governed infrastructure with tenant isolation and full audit observability to ensure its software is compliant.

The company’s big claim is that, unlike traditional AI copilots and low-code tools that create fragile prototypes and experiments that cannot easily scale, it’s able to create real software that runs real business operations. It says its platform has already been deployed in industries such as telecommunications, e-commerce, healthcare and logistics, and says early adopters have seen real results. For instance, it claims, the average deployment has resulted in 10,000 hours saved annually that would otherwise be spent on doing manual work, 99% automated invoice acceptance rates and an 85% reduction in marketing campaign execution.

Those numbers also reveal the versatility of Pit’s platform, which the company claims can build almost any kind of enterprise software. That includes things such as contract processing systems, campaign management tools, cross-system data reconciliation and approval workflows. Each system is custom-built for the company’s specific needs, and integrates with their existing tools so it can pull data directly from them and eliminate the need to constantly move between different applications.

“Every AI company is selling speed,” said Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Alex Rampall. “Pit is selling speed that holds up for years, that’s secure, governed and built to last. It’s a new category.”

Photo: Pit