Redpine has raised $8m in seed funding in a round led by NordicNinja, with participation from fellow Nordic firms Luminar Ventures and node.vc. 

The investment is accelerating Swedish Redpine's global expansion - speeding up development of the platform, including its proprietary retrieval and reranking technology led by founding data scientist Dr Leonora Vesterbacka, as well as working with leading AI labs. Redpine will use the funding to scale its network of proprietary data partnerships, securing access to high-value, non-public datasets across key industries to strengthen the breadth and quality of data available through the platform. 

Redpine is also recruiting across engineering, data science, and go-to-market, adding to a core team that already brings experience from four Nordic tech unicorns - Spotify, Sana, Zettle, and Lunar - plus McKinsey, CERN, and H&M. NordicNinja General Partner Marek Kiisa will also join the board.

Alongside the seed funding, Redpine has received investment from strategic angels including Peter Sarlin (co-founder SiloAI), Patrik Tran (co-founder Validio) and Anna Nordell Westling (co-founder Sana), and leaders from OpenAI, Perplexity, and Spotify.

‍

The AI Data Gap

Founded in 2024 by Anders Hammarbäck and David Österdahl, Redpine fixes the AI information gap: only about 1% of the world's data is openly available for AI training - Redpine unlocks the rest to power AI development. Redpine addresses the status quo by partnering with content owners to unlock premium, non-public data from trusted sources to advance AI compliantly. The startup is already working with leading international AI labs as well as US-based biotechnology research firm, AsedaSciences.

Former VC partner Anders saw that most AI startups and scaleups used the same data sources (i.e. scraped internet data) - with no moat, insufficient accuracy, nor compensation to rights holders. David (part of the early team at Spotify) built the technical platform which transitioned the music industry from declining sales and outright piracy to a smart streaming concept - identifying clear pattern recognition between the two spaces.

‍

Redpine CEO and co-founder Anders Hammarbäck: “Redpine is building the infrastructure to enable the token-based agent economy to grow sustainably for all stakeholders. The opportunities in this space are endless and we see applications across clinical guidelines, case law, physical research, financial markets data, and quality human-created news.”

Redpine CPTO and co-founder David Österdahl: “We are building a scientific solution that addresses initial challenges and creates a solid access model for agentic data. As we saw with music, a piracy-based scraping economy is only transient - until a solid solution appears. Redpine is that solution.”

NordicNinja General Partner Marek Kiisa: “Agentic AI is only as good as the data it's trained on. Today, most of the world’s knowledge is still inaccessible to AI. Combined with an AI-native team that has a world-class track record of execution, this makes Redpine a foundational company for the agentic AI era.”

‍

The Platform

Redpine is a headless platform (API-interface) for AI companies and agents to find and use premium data - across domains, with a focus on scientific data. Redpine focuses on integration with AI platforms: agents use Redpine’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) to send queries, Redpine evaluates the relevant context and delivers premium data to the AI agents, who pay for this data, based on usage (number of tokens). The data is evaluated for quality in real-time. The agents become more capable - and compliant - as all data comes from trustworthy sources.

The Market

AI has moved from experiment to execution, with the AI agent market growing exponentially: McKinsey predicts agentic commerce will generate up to $5tn in global retail revenue and BCG estimates an agentic AI-driven net uplift of $200bn in the total addressable market for tech service providers, both by 2030.

In mission-critical domains like health, law, news, and finance, ‘good enough’ data is not acceptable - accuracy, provenance, and rights compliance are the difference between trusted automation and unacceptable risk. For AI agents that solve tasks over several steps, inaccuracies compound and lead to bigger errors.

At the same time, publishers and data companies are facing a reckoning over requirements to transform their distribution model. Uncompensated scraping, with high-profile copyright lawsuits against many major AI companies, has created a sense of urgency, with companies open to finding ways to welcome new revenue streams from agentic AI.

As Roy Kaufman, Managing Director, Business Development at the Copyright Clearance Center, sees it: “For AI to reach its full potential, we need both the highest quality data available to train, develop and fine-tune, as well as fair compensation paid to the creators and owners of such materials to ensure sustainability into the joint future. Redpine exists to provide both.”

Redpine is already working with global clients and data partners in the US, Europe and Asia, such as Chegg, whose CFO David Longo said: “Redpine is an ideal partner to expand our reach to new markets. Together, we are creating opportunities for innovation while ensuring fair value for our high-quality content.”

‍