Norwegian AI startup Jenz raises €540k from Ada Ventures and Antler, eyes UK launch
Four months after winning a hackathon backed by UK investor Ada Ventures, retail AI startup Jenz has closed a pre-seed round and set its sights on a UK launch within nine months.
Norwegian startup Jenz has raised €540,000 in pre-seed funding from Antler and Ada Ventures, the London-based venture capital firm that first backed the company after it won a hackathon in June. Jenz has also received a NOK 1 million (€92,000) startup grant from Innovation Norway.
The company was founded by Remi Bjørnestad, who serves as chief executive, alongside chief technology officer Jo Schou Sandåker and chief commercial officer Natnael Belete Seifo. Jenz is building an AI platform aimed at helping retailers automate back-office tasks and make better use of scattered business data.
The problem it is solving
Retailers typically run operations across a patchwork of systems, including online stores, point-of-sale platforms, inventory management, accounting software and marketing tools. Jenz says this fragmentation makes it hard for retailers to get a clear view of their business or act on it quickly.
Its platform pulls data from these separate systems into a single structured layer that its AI agent can access and process. This allows retailers to analyse sales and inventory data, forecast demand, test pricing and marketing strategies, and automate routine tasks. The agent can also monitor operations across systems, flag issues and alert staff when a decision is needed.
“Most retailers we talk to want to use AI, but don’t know where and how to start,” said Bjørnestad. “Many have tried generic AI tools and run into the same problems: they start from scratch every time and can’t handle the amount of data a store actually has. When AI is making decisions that cost real money, you have to make sure it acts on real and trusted data. That’s why we built the Jenz agent.”
Early pilot results
Jenz began onboarding pilot customers in late August, working with both online retailers and businesses running multiple physical stores. During the pilot, customers have assigned the platform more than 3,000 tasks across over 20 back-office systems.
The company says some pilot customers reported saving up to 100 hours of work in their first month, while one retailer recorded a 31 per cent increase in team capacity after adopting the platform. These figures come directly from the company and have not been independently verified.
From hackathon win to funded startup
Jenz’s path to funding began at the Norway AI Hackathon in Mandal, organised by Ada Ventures and Startuplab, which the team won in June. Ada Ventures became its first investor shortly afterwards. The founders then relocated from Kristiansand to Oslo and joined Antler’s residency programme, which led to the current pre-seed round.
What it means for the UK ecosystem
The round underlines Ada Ventures’ role in spotting and backing early-stage AI talent beyond the UK, having identified Jenz at a Norwegian hackathon before formal investment. For the UK startup scene, the more concrete signal is Jenz’s stated plan to launch in the UK within the next nine months, which would bring its retail AI agent into a market with a dense base of e-commerce and multi-store retailers.
What to watch next
Attention will turn to how Jenz converts its pilot metrics into paying customers, how it structures its UK entry, and whether Ada Ventures or Antler lead further funding as the company scales beyond the Nordic region.