Redpine, a Stockholm-based startup building a data API for AI agents, has raised €6.8m in a seed round led by NordicNinja. Luminar Ventures and Node.vc also participated.

The company sells access to premium, non-public datasets, scientific archives, clinical guidelines, case law, financial market data, and curated news, through a pay-per-token model. AI labs and agents query the API; rights holders receive a share of the revenue.

Most AI systems today rely on open internet data, which represents a fraction of what exists. Vast stores of specialist information sit behind institutional walls, in publisher archives and research databases, with no clean programmatic route in. Redpine positions itself as the licensed intermediary.

"We're a bit like a Spotify that streams data instead of music, because we also license it directly from the rights holders," says co-founder David Österdahl, an early Spotify employee who helped build the streaming platform's technical infrastructure.

Österdahl founded Redpine in 2024 alongside CEO Anders Hammarbäck, a former partner at startup generator Antler. The pair saw that as foundation models exhaust publicly available training data, demand for high-quality, human-created content would rise sharply, particularly as synthetic "AI slop" dilutes the open web.

The company says it is already working with leading international AI labs and US-based biotechnology research firm AsedaSciences. It counts angel investors from OpenAI and Perplexity among its backers, and is in discussions with large US model makers.

What this signals

Data licensing for AI is becoming a category in its own right. Publishers and research institutions have grown wary of handing over corpora to large technology companies without compensation. Redpine's revenue-share approach echoes the music industry's transition from piracy to paid streaming, a comparison the founders make explicitly.

The seed round is modest by global AI standards, but it reflects growing investor appetite in the Nordics for infrastructure-layer AI businesses. NordicNinja, the round's lead, is backed by Japanese corporates and has been active in European deep-tech.

Redpine plans to use the funding for global expansion and continued platform development. Whether it can sign enough data partners, and enough AI buyers, to build a defensible marketplace remains the central question.