€540k · Pre-Seed · AI · Oslo, Norway
Oslo-based Jenz, an AI platform for retail back-office operations, has raised €540k in pre-seed funding from Antler and Ada Ventures. The financing was reported alongside the product's launch at Antler's demo day during Oslo Innovation Week. Shifter reported the round on 21 October.
Jenz also received a NOK 1m startup grant from Innovation Norway. Tech.eu records the grant as a separate event, but it forms part of the same public financing announcement and is treated here as additional non-equity support rather than a second round.
Turning fragmented retail data into operating actions
Retail teams often work across webshops, point-of-sale systems, inventory tools, accounting software and advertising platforms. Jenz says its platform connects those systems into one operating layer, then lets an AI agent answer questions, prepare reports and carry out tasks such as reorder checks, demand forecasts and campaign monitoring. Teams can reach the agent through tools including Slack, Teams and email, while actions affecting spend, stock or customers can retain an approval step.
The commercial promise is not simply a faster chatbot. By keeping operational context across systems, Jenz can potentially turn a recurring question into a repeatable workflow: identify a stock risk, assemble the supporting data, prepare a purchase order and route the decision to the right person. That could reduce the cost of routine coordination for retailers without requiring staff to replace every underlying system.
The same breadth creates the execution challenge. Each retailer has a different mix of tools, data quality and approval rules, so Jenz will need to make integrations and controls repeatable rather than rebuilding them for every customer. The company's plan to make the product fully self-service matters because it is the route from useful pilots to software margins.
Early pilots set the benchmark for expansion
Jenz was founded in 2026 by Remi Bjørnestad, Jo Schou Sandåker and Natnael Belete Seifo after the trio won the Norway AI Hackathon organised by Ada Ventures and Startuplab. According to Shifter, the company began pilots in late August with online retailers and chains operating physical stores. Jenz says those pilots assigned more than 3,000 tasks across over 20 systems, and that some pilot shops saved as much as 100 hours in their first month.
Those are company-reported early results, but they give the startup a concrete test for the next phase: whether time savings survive across more customers and increasingly varied system stacks. Jenz is already testing demand outside Norway and plans a UK launch within nine months. Converting that expansion into repeatable deployments will show whether its shared data layer can become durable infrastructure for commerce teams rather than a collection of custom automations.
Sources checked:
Shifter funding report · Jenz product site · Tech.eu Pre-Seed record · Tech.eu Grant record
