At Voima Ventures, we invest in the boldest founders and technologies that redefine the frontier of science and business. That’s why we’re proud to announce our latest investment in Farang, a Sweden-based AI research lab that has raised €1.5M to launch a completely new foundational AI architecture designed to be more intelligent and efficient than existing models used by current market leaders.
Farang is developing a new type of AI architecture designed to be more intelligent and efficient than existing transformer models used by current market leaders. While most AI companies rely on the same underlying Transformer architecture introduced by Google in 2017—powering everything from ChatGPT to Claude through an attention-based mechanism for processing text—Farang’s technology mimics how the human brain works to create intuitive responses while requiring twenty-five times fewer computational resources and therefore significantly lower training costs.
Instead of predicting text word-by-word, Farang’s architecture comprehends the complete response first – like imagining a picture before painting it – and then translates that concept into words. While recent AI models have added reasoning steps that provide “thinking time,” they still rely on word-prediction. In Farang’s approach, this thinking process is conducted internally through non-textual mechanisms, resulting in more coherent responses while dramatically reducing computational requirements.
Emil Romanus, Farang’s Founder, comments: “We’re not building another application layer on top of existing models. We’ve developed a completely new foundational architecture that enables us to create specialized AI assistants that outperform current solutions in specific domains like programming and medicine, while using twenty-five times less computational resources. Based on current testing, we believe the percentage of resources used will decrease even further in the future.”
Founded in 2025, Farang consists of a team of five highly experienced researchers, developers, and business professionals. The company is led by Emil Romanus, an engineer with over 20 years of experience in search, AI, and previous startup ventures.
From left to right: Inka Mero (Managing Partner Voima Ventures), Emil Romanus (CEO and Founder Farang), and Jenny Engerfelt (Partner Voima Ventures).
Building Specialized AI for Real-World Problems
Farang plans to initially focus on specialized applications where current AI assistants struggle or underperform, including AI assistants for specific programming languages and frameworks, specialized medical fields, and internal company AI tools. The company’s first target is React programming, where it aims to produce more optimized and iterable code than existing LLMs.
The beauty of the architecture is that it enables creation of highly specialized models for niche use cases like untapped medical domain models that would be prohibitively expensive with traditional approaches. Farang can analyze unstructured medical data or create programming assistants that truly understand specific frameworks, not just general coding patterns.
Farang’s technology also enables organizations to deploy specialized AI models on their own premises with full privacy controls—a critical advantage for healthcare, legal, and financial services companies handling sensitive data. Rather than sending proprietary information to external AI services, companies can train and run Farang’s models entirely in-house while maintaining complete data sovereignty.
Farang’s vision is that companies will have specialized assistants running on their own infrastructure, integrated with their existing systems. A law firm could have an AI that understands its specific practice areas and case history, or a research hospital could have an assistant trained on their unique patient data—all while keeping that sensitive information completely private.
An Ambitious Long-Term Vision
While starting with niche applications to prove the technology, Farang has set its sights on becoming a market leader in artificial intelligence, ultimately aiming to compete with and surpass OpenAI in the general AI space.
By proving the architecture works in specialized domains first, the team is building the foundation to eventually challenge the current leaders across all AI applications.
We look for exceptional founders and technologies that reset the curve—not just optimize around the edges. Farang showcases how Europe can step up in the global AI race, as its foundational architecture provides a true paradigm shift—specialized, efficient, and enterprise-grade from day one.
The €1.5 million seed round was led by Voima Ventures and the Amadeus APEX Technology Fund, with notable entrepreneur angel investors including Tero Ojanpera (Co-founder, Silo AI), Nilay Oza, and Niraj Aswani (Former Founders, Klevu).
