The Oslo-based vibe coding startup Riff (formerly Databutton) has secured a $16m Series A.

The round was led by Northzone with the participation of Norwegian VCs Skyfall Ventures and Sondo Capital, Finnish Maki.vc, Berlin-based Global Founders Capital and the Supercell founder Ilkka Paananen’s family office, Illusian. The new capital brings the total funding to $21m.

Vibe coding is transforming software development, allowing non-coders to create, launch, and maintain applications with minimal prior knowledge. However, a report published by MIT earlier this year shows that although companies are keen to integrate AI into their businesses, a large majority – 95% – of those initiatives fail to deliver real value.

This is the problem Riff wants to solve by targeting companies that want to use AI applications and agents to increase their productivity rapidly, says CEO and cofounder Trygve Karper. The company’s funding coincides with the launch of an extended suite of products, including AI apps, automations and agents connected to the rest of the customer’s tech stack.

“A lot of the explosion in vibe coding has been driven by people who see that they can finally do a startup. Which is good, but it’s not really us. But taking that same enthusiasm and results and putting that into an actual business setting, we can enable companies to do that internally.

The value created there has an enormous potential,” Karper says.

Read: The vibe coding startups which have raised in the last year

The company was founded in 2021 by Karper, Martin Røed and Viral Shah, who all previously worked across engineering and product teams at Cognite, Norway’s first unicorn. Riff is now used by around 150k users, with Cognite among its business customers.

“At Cognite, I built all the AI, data science and machine learning. So we walked around in huge companies looking at how to be part of big digitalisation programs, and we saw a lot of failure – top-down initiatives usually do that.”

Karper says that the company is in close contact with its customers and offers training programmes on its vibe coding platform, security, as well as templates and examples of what to build.

“It’s very easy to get started and give value, and we want to enable them to actually do it in practice.”

The company is already seeing strong adoption across industries, including financial services, logistics, healthcare, manufacturing and consumer goods. With 40% business customers, Karper says that retention is, according to what he has heard, better than that of competitors.

“We see that [business customers] are very sticky and we have a good retention there.”

So far, Riff’s customer retention has stabilised at 51% after three months. Given the number of curiosity sign-ups in AI, and the fact that consumers also sign up, this is quite extraordinary according to Karper – and better than other vibe coding startups.

“There is a reason for this, and for us, there is always a path to success for our customers. That is why we have a services arm in Singapore, for example. We also have a very personal relationship with our customers when they first come in,” he says.

“That said, we are launching a new product [today]. Retention on that is still unknown, but we have strong reasons to believe it will be even better.”