Palette has secured \u20ac3 million in pre-seed funding led by Ugly Duckling Ventures.<\/p>\n
Co-founder Brian Kyed, who spent 10 years building his last startup, now wants to help companies maintain control of their AI context rather than relying on a single model.<\/p>\n
The Copenhagen-based startup will use the funding to turn design partners into paying customers.<\/p>\n
Brian Kyed<\/a> spent a decade turning a Copenhagen crowdfunding project into a successful business. He left a few years ago, wanting to return to the early, more flexible stage of building a company before formal processes are in place. The recent progress in AI reminded him of those early days of software-as-a-service.<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody was just trying things. There was no recipe,\u201d he tells Tech Funding News.<\/p>\n This mindset inspired the launch of Palette<\/a>, a Copenhagen startup that raised \u20ac3 million in pre-seed funding led by Ugly Duckling Ventures, with support from Emblem, Acadian Ventures, and several angel investors.\u00a0<\/p>\n Why Palette is focusing on model neutrality\u00a0<\/p>\n Palette Desktop, which launched alongside the funding news, lets teams use any AI agent, such as Claude Code, Codex, Mistral, or Gemini, directly on files in Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kyed points out that engineers already work this way with coding agents, and he wants to make this possible for everyone in a company. This would let team members work together on shared folders while using different agents at the same time.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you build your entire company to only use one model, and you have all your context in there, then your entire company is 100% dependent on one of these vendors \u2014 they can set the price they want. There\u2019s always a newer model, and they keep becoming better and cheaper. Companies should own their own context, so they can use any model,\u201d Kyed tells TFN.\u00a0<\/p>\n But what if Anthropic or OpenAI create their own context layers and fill the gap Palette is targeting? Kyed admits this could happen.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThey will probably do something, because context is really what makes agents usable,\u201d he says. Still, the bigger challenge is that many companies are not taking action: \u201cWe see many companies that want to become AI-native but do not know how.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Kyed is more worried about new startups going after the same idea than about established platforms like Glean, which reached about $300 million in annual recurring revenue at a $7.2 billion valuation by May 2026, and Freehand<\/a>, which raised $75 million to build a similar context layer for supply-chain agents.<\/p>\n The founders, the funding, and what Ugly Duckling Ventures knew from the start<\/p>\n Palette was founded in 2025 by Kyed, Lars Ettrup<\/a>, Steffen D. Sommer<\/a>, and Christian Lomholt.<\/a> The team now has eight people, including the four founders, and plans to grow to 10 with the new funding.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kyed says the investment will help them get more paying customers, since the product is already used daily and people are willing to pay. Palette got its first paying customers from a small design-partner program.\u00a0<\/p>\n