€1.3m · Seed · AI · Stockholm, Sweden
Stockholm-based Cofactor has raised €1.3m (SEK 14m) in pre-seed funding to build an AI collaboration layer for retailers and suppliers. The company said the round was backed by PSV Tech, Greens Ventures, Angel Invest and angels Kræn Østergård Nielsen, Per Thau, Pascal Clouzard and Lars Lindgren. The capital will deepen the platform, extend its workflows and bring it to more commercial teams.
Retail's missing collaboration layer
Retailers and suppliers make commitments across promotions, trade funding, cost-price changes, product data and deductions, but the supporting information often remains scattered across email, PDFs and spreadsheets. Cofactor is designed to turn those exchanges into a shared system of record: it reads agreements and proposals, checks them against contracts and business rules, and writes approved actions back to ERP, planning and data systems.
The company estimates that more than €10m leaks annually for every €500m in retail sales through missed rebates, incorrect deductions and commercial terms that are not executed as agreed. It also says as much as 80% of commercial planning steps can move off spreadsheets and email. Those are company-reported estimates, but they define the commercial test clearly: customers should be able to measure recovered value and faster execution, not merely the number of documents processed.
Cofactor's integration approach is central to that test. The platform is meant to work through the productivity tools teams already use while connecting to ERP systems, data warehouses, supplier portals, email and EDI. That lowers the adoption burden for one side of a trading relationship and creates a path to expand from a first workflow into pricing, deductions, product data and invoicing. The harder dependency is trust: commercial data is sensitive, and automated actions need clear permissions, audit trails and reliable approval controls. Cofactor says European customer data remains in the EU, is not used to train models and cannot be written back without configured approval.
Operator experience shapes the wedge
The three founders, Andreas Willgert, Alexander Back and Robin Bartholdson, bring more than 25 years of combined retail-technology experience across Coop, 7-Eleven, Mathem, El Corte Inglés and Tom&Co, according to PSV Tech. Swedish Tech News reported that Willgert and Bartholdson previously founded retail analytics company Formulate, which RELEX acquired in 2022.
That operating history gives Cofactor a credible starting point in the workflows it wants to replace. The pre-seed round now has to turn that domain knowledge into repeatable deployments: begin with a costly reconciliation problem, connect to the customer's existing systems, prove recovered value, then widen the shared data layer without making each rollout a bespoke integration project.
Sources checked:
Cofactor funding announcement · Cofactor product · Cofactor careers · PSV Tech · Swedish Tech News · Tech.eu Funding Explorer
