Jenz secures €540K pre-seed funding four months after hackathon victory to automate retail operations
Norwegian AI startup Jenz has secured €540,000 in pre-seed funding from Antler and Ada Ventures. The company has also received a startup grant of NOK 1 million (approximately €92,000) from Innovation Norway.
Founded by Remi Bjørnestad (CEO), Jo Schou Sandåker (CTO) and Natnael Belete Seifo (CCO), Jenz is building an AI-powered platform that helps retailers automate day-to-day operations and extract greater value from their business data.
Retail businesses often rely on multiple disconnected systems to manage their operations, including e-commerce platforms, point-of-sale software, inventory management tools, accounting systems and marketing applications. Jenz aims to overcome this fragmentation by consolidating data from these sources into a unified, structured layer that its AI agent can access and process.
The platform allows retailers to analyse sales and inventory performance, forecast demand, assess pricing and marketing strategies, and automate repetitive workflows. By connecting information across different systems, the AI agent can also monitor business operations, detect potential problems and alert relevant team members when their attention or a decision is required.
Most retailers we talk to want to use AI, but don't know where and how to start. 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,
said Remi Bjørnestad, co-founder and CEO of Jenz.
Jenz started onboarding pilot customers in late August, partnering with both e-commerce retailers and businesses operating multiple physical stores. During the pilot phase, customers have assigned the platform more than 3,000 tasks across over 20 back-office systems.
According to the company, some pilot customers saved up to 100 hours of work during their first month of using the platform. One retailer also reported a 31% increase in team capacity after adopting the technology.
Jenz originated at the Norway AI Hackathon, organised by Ada Ventures and Startuplab in Mandal, where the startup won the competition in June. Following the event, Ada Ventures became the company's first investor. The founding team subsequently moved from Kristiansand to Oslo and joined Antler's residency programme.
Jenz plans to expand beyond the Nordic markets, with a launch in the UK expected within the next nine months.