Redpine secures €6.8 million, with NordicNinja at the helm, to develop a licensed data API for AI agents.

      The latest funding round has raised a total of €9 million. Investors such as OpenAI, Perplexity, and Spotify supported the seed funding. The platform functions as a headless API, allowing AI agents to query and purchase premium licensed datasets in real time using a token-based model. Competing companies include Scale AI, Appen, and Defined.ai, which primarily focus on annotation, while Redpine operates as API-native.

      Stockholm-based AI data infrastructure startup Redpine has secured €6.8 million in new funding led by NordicNinja, with contributions from Luminar Ventures and node.vc, as well as various technology founders and operators. This funding round increases the total funds raised to €9 million.

      The company plans to utilize the funds to expand globally and enhance its network of exclusive data partnerships. Redpine was established in 2024 by Anders Hammarbäck (formerly with McKinsey and Antler) and David Österdahl (previously from Spotify and iZettle), with Leonora Vesterbacka (PhD, CERN; AI R&D at KBLab) serving as the founding data scientist.

      Redpine contends that the current data challenges in the AI sector resemble the music industry’s piracy issues prior to Spotify's emergence. The majority of AI systems rely on crawled internet data, which presents legal vulnerabilities and quality inconsistencies, resulting in no competitive advantage and no remuneration for the rights holders whose content is utilized.

      Legal pressures regarding unauthorized AI training are rising: Anthropic recently settled a $1.5 billion copyright case, and new EU disclosure regulations are tightening the legal framework. The founders of Redpine liken their platform to the Spotify model for data: “Spotify didn’t eliminate piracy by criminalizing it; it did so by making licensed access more convenient and superior to alternatives.”

      The platform serves as a headless API layer where AI agents can query it, obtain premium datasets in real time, and pay for access according to a token-based usage model, meaning costs are tied to consumption instead of being a fixed subscription.

      Redpine assesses data quality in real time, removing obsolete or unreliable content prior to delivery to the agent. Its focus lies in critical fields where imprecise data can lead to cascading errors in multi-step workflows, including healthcare, legal affairs, financial markets, scientific research, and journalism.

      The angel investors from the €1.1 million seed round demonstrate this sector-specific trend: Colin M. Evans (OpenAI), Gustav Lindqvist (Perplexity), Anna Nordell Westling (Sana), Daniel Langkilde (founder of Kognic, sold to Volvo), and several former Spotify employees.

      New investor Peter Sarlin, co-founder and former CEO of Silo AI, the Finnish AI firm acquired by AMD for $665 million in 2024, is also involved.

      Redpine aims to establish itself as the global leader in AI data infrastructure within three to five years. It identifies the AI training data market as its addressable market, projecting a growth rate of 24.9% annually within the broader trillion-dollar AI sector.

      The platform currently offers access to over 100 billion tokens of premium licensed data. In contrast to competitors like Scale AI, Appen, and Defined.ai, which focus on human-labeled annotation services, Redpine distinguishes itself as an API-native, agent-first solution that provides licensed data in real time rather than fixed datasets produced through human annotation.

      Whether a startup from Stockholm can capture the data licensing market against well-funded US competitors before legal constraints on scraped training data compel a structural shift will depend on how swiftly enterprises and AI laboratories embrace API-native data infrastructure, as well as the willingness of rights holders to utilize a platform instead of opting for direct negotiations.