Swedish AI startup Sana, founded by Joel Hellermark at the age of 19, has successfully raised $55 million in a recent funding round led by venture capital fund NEA. This investment has valued the company at $500 million and will be utilized to expand its research lab and drive commercial expansion in the United States.
Sana faced a challenge earlier this year when its team struggled to handle the increasing demand from corporate clients such as Merck, Robinhood, and Electrolux. The company’s AI tools, which help make sense of complex internal databases and software like Salesforce, were in high demand but required significant time and resources to serve large customers. In response, Hellermark devised a strategy to offer a free version of the AI agent that could draft emails, take meeting minutes, and complete simple forms. This move proved successful, attracting around 100,000 new workplaces within six months. Teams with more than five members now pay $30 per user per month.
Hellermark believes that Sana’s unique user interface will cater to the next billion AI users, offering a more efficient alternative to working with Microsoft or building AI assistants from scratch internally. The recent funding round, although modest compared to other AI giants, brings Sana’s total funding to over $130 million, positioning it as one of Europe’s best-funded AI startups.
Sana’s technology integrates with various software tools, including Slack, Sharepoint, and Salesforce, and aims to provide a comprehensive solution for companies to curate and assemble their data for different use cases. The company can plug into any large language model used by a company and utilizes Retrieval-Augmented Generation to tailor its AI agents with a customer’s internal data.
The new investment round has doubled Sana’s valuation since its last funding round in May 2023. While the company currently generates over $20 million in annual recurring revenue, it has not yet reached breakeven. Scott Sandell, executive chairman of NEA, believes that Sana has reached a significant inflection point in its growth and emphasizes the power of the free business model to capture and monetize the market.
In addition to the funding, Sana has made strategic moves, including the acquisition of Tel Aviv-based AI agent startup CTRL and the hiring of former Google and Inceptive AI researcher Oscar Täckström as its chief scientist, along with former Apple designer Eric Olmers.
Joel Hellermark envisions Sana as the user interface layer for AI, aiming to enable companies to move from a few internal AI use cases to thousands. With its Scandinavian design ethos, Sana aims to streamline repetitive tasks for office workers and provide a unified solution for integrating and leveraging data across various platforms.