New Amsterdam AI startup emerges from stealth: Lleverage raises €2M to help businesses leverage AI effectively

Amsterdam-based Lleverage, an AI startup, announced on Wednesday that it has emerged from stealth with €2M in pre-seed funding.

This round includes notable advisors such as Bob van Luijt (Founder of Weaviate), Chris Moojen (Executive at Atlassian), and Martijn Niessen (CEO of Infinite Group).

With this capital, the Dutch company aims to expand its client roster from 5 to 100 paying SaaS and eCommerce companies by the end of this year.

“Having witnessed firsthand the challenges companies face in integrating AI into their products, I firmly believe in Lleverage’s proposition and approach. Their platform effectively bridges the gap in AI knowledge, enabling businesses to easily build and deploy AI features,” says, Bob van Luijt, Founder and CEO of Weaviate.

“The team’s extensive experience, execution, and clear vision have convinced me that Lleverage is the right solution for the market’s needs, and I am excited to support them on this journey,” adds Luijt.

Lleverage: Making AI accessible

Lleverage was founded by Lennard Kooy (ex-CEO of Storyteq), Badr Eddial (ex-CTO of Storyteq), Tom van Wees (ex-CCO of Ginger), and Tim Beyer (ex-COO of Sana Commerce)

The Dutch company aims to tackle critical challenges in AI development, including lack of AI knowledge and expertise, the complexity of building with large language models (LLMs), and the hesitation to deploy AI into production.

Lennard Kooy, Co-founder of Lleverage, adds, “In our previous ventures, we experienced the difficulties developers faced in building meaningful AI features and deploying them due to a lack of AI knowledge and resources. Lleverage aims to equip every company with the tools to leverage AI effectively.”

The company aims to make AI accessible to all software engineers, enabling them to build AI features without deep AI expertise.

The company does it through its low-code AI development and observability platform. It simplifies the creation, testing, and deployment of AI features.

The platform includes tools for building and testing prompts with various models, creating AI pipelines and workflows visually or through code, and monitoring and optimising performance.