The round brings total raised to €9 million. Investors from OpenAI, Perplexity, and Spotify backed the seed. The platform operates as a headless API that lets AI agents query and pay for premium licensed datasets in real time, on a token-based model. Competitors include Scale AI, Appen, and Defined.ai, all annotation-first; Redpine is API-native.
Redpine, the Stockholm-based AI data infrastructure startup, has raised €6.8 million in new funding led by NordicNinja, with participation from Luminar Ventures and node.vc, alongside several technology founders and operators. The round brings total funding to €9 million.
The company will use the capital to expand internationally and grow its network of exclusive data partnerships.
It was founded in 2024 by Anders Hammarbäck (ex-McKinsey, Antler) and David Österdahl (ex-Spotify, iZettle), with Leonora Vesterbacka (PhD, CERN; AI R&D at KBLab) as the founding data scientist.
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Redpine argues that the AI industry's current data problem is structurally analogous to the music industry's piracy problem before Spotify.
Most AI systems are trained on scraped internet data, a legally fragile, quality-uncertain foundation that creates no differentiation between competitors and generates no compensation for the rights holders whose work is being used.
Legal pressure on unauthorised AI training is increasing: Anthropic settled a $1.5 billion book copyright case, and new EU disclosure requirements are tightening the regulatory environment.
Redpine's founders frame their platform explicitly as the Spotify model for data: “Spotify didn't defeat piracy by making it illegal, it defeated it by making licensed access easier and better than the alternative.”
The platform operates as a headless API layer. AI agents query it, retrieve premium datasets in real time, and pay for access on a token-based usage model, meaning the cost scales with consumption rather than being a flat subscription.
Redpine evaluates data quality in real time, filtering out outdated or unreliable material before it reaches the agent. The focus is on mission-critical domains where inaccurate data creates compounding errors in multi-step agentic workflows: healthcare, legal, financial markets, scientific research, and news.
The angel investors from the €1.1 million seed round reflect this domain specificity: Colin M. Evans (OpenAI), Gustav Lindqvist (Perplexity), Anna Nordell Westling (Sana), Daniel Langkilde (founder of Kognic, sold to Volvo), and several Spotify alumni.
New investor Peter Sarlin is co-founder and former CEO of Silo AI, the Finnish AI lab acquired by AMD for $665 million in 2024.
Redpine's declared goal is to become the global category leader in AI data infrastructure within three to five years. Its stated addressable market is the AI training data segment, which it cites as growing at 24.9% annually within the broader trillion-dollar AI market.
The platform already provides access to more than 100 billion tokens of premium licensed data. Competitors Scale AI, Appen, and Defined.ai are annotation-first services built around human labelling workflows; Redpine positions itself as an API-native, agent-first alternative that delivers licensed data in real time rather than static datasets produced through human annotation.
Whether the data licensing market can be won by a Stockholm startup against well-capitalised US incumbents before the legal pressure on scraped training data forces a structural change will depend on how quickly enterprises and AI labs adopt API-native data infrastructure, and whether rights holders are willing to distribute through a platform rather than negotiating direct deals.