Copenhagen repeat founders raise €3M to make switching AI models seamless

Palette has closed a €3 million pre-seed round led by Ugly Duckling Ventures, with support from Emblem, Acadian Ventures and several angel investors. The Copenhagen startup is built around a simple idea: companies should be able to move their AI work between models without rebuilding everything from scratch each time.

That pitch comes from co-founder Brian Kyed, who spent about a decade building his last company before stepping away a few years ago. He says he wanted the earlier, messier stage of building again, before processes harden. The recent AI boom reminded him of the early SaaS days, when people were still testing ideas and there was no single playbook.

Palette’s first product, Palette Desktop, launched alongside the funding announcement. It lets teams use AI agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Mistral or Gemini directly on files in Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox. Kyed says engineers already work this way with coding tools, and he wants the same flexibility for the rest of a company so different people can use different agents on shared folders at the same time.

The company is targeting what Kyed sees as the real weakness in model-led AI adoption: dependency. If one vendor controls the company’s context, that vendor controls the price and the workflow. He thinks newer models will keep getting better and cheaper, so the durable asset should be the company’s own context, not a single model choice.

Palette was founded in 2025 by Kyed, Lars Ettrup, Steffen D. Sommer and Christian Lomholt. The team has eight people now, including the founders, and plans to grow to 10 with the new money. The startup says its product is already used daily and that its first paying customers came out of a small design-partner program. Ugly Duckling partner Andreas Green Rasmussen said the firm had worked with the team before and backed the round because it sees Palette as a possible operating layer for AI across a company.