How to Actually Get Hired

Adam Jafer is a KTH Royal Institute of Technology engineer who co-founded a European unicorn before he completed his degree. He joined Voi as a co-founder in June 2018, at the very beginning, which means he was building and operating a micromobility company simultaneously with finishing his engineering education at one of the most technically demanding universities in Scandinavia. KTH produces a disproportionate share of Sweden's senior engineers and technical founders, Spotify, Klarna, and now a growing cohort of AI infrastructure companies all trace talent back to its campus. Over seven years, he scaled Voi from a founding team to nearly 1,000 employees operating in 13 countries across Europe. His role at Voi was engineering and AI leadership: he is listed as Tech Lead and Co-Founder, which means he was simultaneously building the technical infrastructure, leading product development, and contributing to the operational strategy of a company navigating a heavily regulated, physically complex market across more than a dozen national regulatory environments. His angel investment portfolio reveals how he was thinking before Pit. He has backed Byterat (battery intelligence), Nothing (consumer electronics), Breathe Battery Technologies, Synq, Magic.dev, CodiumAI (now Qodo), Unify, CURE, and Lun. That is a concentrated set of bets: battery tech (from his Voi experience with battery-powered vehicles), developer AI tools (Magic.dev and CodiumAI), and consumer hardware. The CodiumAI bet in particular is revealing: he was backing AI-assisted code generation before founding a company that uses AI to generate production enterprise software. The intellectual investment preceded the product. His most discussed public statement is also his most honest one: a LinkedIn post in which he declared "Yes, our team currently has no junior engineers. At Pit, agents now do most of what junior engineers used to do." He has since walked it back: "It may have started like that, but you need a good mix as you scale." The retraction is as interesting as the original statement. It tells you that Pit actually ran this experiment, that agents were genuinely doing junior engineering work in the early months, and that scale changed the equation. He did not delete the post. He corrected the record in a subsequent interview and moved on. His vision for Pit is stated plainly in his TechCrunch interview: "The aha moment for the bigger opportunity was when the models were no longer just chatbots that generate text, but became more agentic and could do things." He is not a researcher who built a theory and then a product. He is an operator who watched AI cross a capability threshold inside his own company and decided to productize what he had already proven worked.

Fredrik Hjelm is the CEO of Voi and the non-operational co-founder of Pit, which is an unusual combination that tells you something about how this company came to exist. Hjelm started his first business at age 12 in rural Östersund, Sweden. He attended Stockholm School of Economics, where he studied Business and Economics. He also studied Russian at Uppsala University and then attended the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy from 2012, before being stationed at the Swedish Defence Attaché Office in Moscow from 2013 to 2015. That detour, from SSE economics student to military interpreter in Moscow at the height of Sweden's complicated relationship with Russian foreign policy, is the most revealing biographical detail in his public record. He speaks Russian fluently and spent two years operating inside the diplomatic and intelligence environment of a foreign capital as a young reserve officer. Before Voi, he co-founded Guestit (an Airbnb management company) and worked in business development for Avito.ru, Russia's leading classified advertising platform, which follows directly from the Moscow posting. He co-founded Voi in 2018 and has taken it from zero to profitable, IPO-candidate status with operations across 50+ European cities. His investor and advisory portfolio includes Lovable, Deel, Tibber, Tandem, and Nothing, and he co-founded Always Summer Asset Management, a Nordic credit and growth investment vehicle. He is listed by the Pit team as a "non-operational co-founder": his value is network and credibility, not day-to-day involvement. The a16z relationship is the proof of that value. Hjelm had built a relationship with Ben Horowitz, Gabriel Vasquez, and Jen Kha years before Pit existed, when a16z visited Stockholm to understand the European tech ecosystem. When Pit needed backing, those relationships were already warm. His LinkedIn post about Stockholm's current AI moment is worth reading: "Teenagers building their first company sit next to veterans starting their next one. The full mix is showing up. Sweden has always been good at riding technological shifts even when we don't build the underlying platforms." That observation is both accurate and self-aware: Pit is an application-layer company, not a model company. Sweden is riding the AI wave by building on top of it, and Hjelm is one of the people most responsible for establishing that it is possible to build a globally significant company from Stockholm.

Filip Lindvall is the third Voi co-founder at Pit and the one most directly involved in day-to-day engineering. He was one of four Voi co-founders who built the technical infrastructure that powered a European micromobility company at scale across 13 countries: real-time vehicle tracking, fleet management, city-specific regulatory compliance systems, and the operational tooling that kept 1,000 employees coordinated. That engineering context is the direct predecessor to what Pit is building. Voi's internal operations ran on exactly the kind of patchwork of custom tools, spreadsheets, and workflow automations that Pit now automates for other enterprises. Filip built some of those systems and then watched them become the product thesis. The founding photo shows the full team: Adam Jafer (CEO and Founding Engineer), Filip Lindvall (Founding Engineer), Anton Öberg (Founding Engineer), Fredrik Olovsson (Founding Engineer), and Fredrik Dexter (Founding Designer). Five of the six are engineers. The sixth is a designer. That team composition tells you what the product building phase looks like: engineering-first, with one designer who owns the entire UX surface, and no room for anything that does not directly advance the product.