Stockholm-based startup Redpine has raised €6.8 million to expand its AI data platform, offering real-time access to licensed data via an API and challenging the reliance on web-scraped content amid growing legal pressures.
Redpine, a Stockholm-based startup building infrastructure for AI data, has raised €6.8 million in fresh funding in a round led by NordicNinja, with backing from Luminar Ventures and node.vc. The new capital lifts its total funding to €9 million and will be used to push into international markets while expanding a network of exclusive data partnerships.
Founded in 2024 by Anders Hammarbäck and David Österdahl, with Leonora Vesterbacka as founding data scientist, Redpine is pitching a different kind of data business for the AI era. Rather than selling static, human-labelled datasets, the company offers a headless API that lets AI agents query premium licensed data in real time and pay on a token-based usage model. Redpine says the system is designed for mission-critical areas including healthcare, legal services, financial markets, scientific research and news, where poor data can quickly compound into larger errors.
The startup’s argument is that the industry’s dependence on scraped web data is increasingly brittle, legally exposed and commercially undifferentiated. In that sense, the founders say, the problem resembles the music industry before Spotify: instead of trying to police misuse, the answer is to make licensed access more practical than piracy. That pitch comes as legal pressure on unauthorised AI training data continues to intensify, with major disputes and new EU disclosure requirements sharpening the debate around how models should be trained.
Redpine’s backers include investors linked to OpenAI, Perplexity and Spotify, alongside new investor Peter Sarlin, the co-founder and former chief executive of Silo AI, which AMD acquired in 2024. The company says its platform already gives access to more than 100 billion tokens of premium licensed data and positions itself against annotation-first firms such as Scale AI, Appen and Defined.ai. Its long-term aim is to become a global leader in AI data infrastructure within three to five years, a goal that will depend on whether enterprises, AI labs and rights holders are ready to move from scraped content to licensed, API-native data pipelines.
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Source: Noah Wire Services
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The draft above was created using the information available at the time the story first
emerged. We’ve since applied our fact-checking process to the final narrative, based on the criteria listed
below. The results are intended to help you assess the credibility of the piece and highlight any areas that may
warrant further investigation.
Freshness check
Score:
10
Notes:
The article was published on April 28, 2026, and no earlier versions of this specific content were found. The information appears to be fresh and original.
Quotes check
Score:
10
Notes:
The article does not contain direct quotes, so this check is not applicable.
Source reliability
Score:
8
Notes:
The article is from The Next Web, a reputable technology news outlet. However, the article includes a promotional link to Redpine’s website, which may indicate a potential conflict of interest. This could affect the perceived objectivity of the reporting.
Plausibility check
Score:
9
Notes:
The claims about Redpine’s funding and business model are plausible and align with industry trends. However, the comparison to Spotify’s model for data access is a marketing angle that may not fully capture the complexities of the data licensing market.
Overall assessment
Verdict (FAIL, OPEN, PASS): CONDITIONAL
Confidence (LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH): MEDIUM
Summary:
While the article provides fresh and plausible information, the inclusion of promotional content and potential conflicts of interest raise concerns about the independence and objectivity of the reporting. Editors should exercise caution and consider seeking additional independent verification before publishing.
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