AI startup Sana has raised $55m in a round led by US-giant NEA, reaching a valuation of $500m. Menlo Ventures and other investors also participated in the round. The Swedish company, founded in 2016, has raised a total of $130m.
Sana develops enterprise software it calls a “knowledge assistant”, which indexes company information, making it searchable and accessible to employees through the use of AI.
As part of this funding round, the AI startup is also announcing the acquisition of Israel-based CTRL, an AI automation startup used by companies like Stripe and Airtable.
In a statement, Sana’s founder and CEO, Joel Hellermark, said: “CTRL’s expertise is helping us scale the infrastructure needed to allow users to build AI agents with the highest level of customisation, permissions, and AI guardrails.”
The company serves around 300 enterprise customers, including pharmaceutical firms Novartis and Merck and mobility startup Voi. It also has approximately 20k commercial users who have signed up via the website and independently integrated Sana.
By integrating all of a customer’s internal applications into its product, as well as external platforms like Salesforce, Notion, Slack, Google Drive, and meetings, the knowledge assistant can search almost every store of company information an employee might need.
“If you can build the best index of all knowledge within a company, connect it to LLMs, and then own the user experience, you create the interface for AGI (artificial general intelligence), and that is what we are working towards now,” Hellermark told Sifted earlier this year.
Like many other AI companies that base their products on third-party large language models (LLMs), Sana operates in a market filled with hype and competition. Sana is going toe-to-toe with Google and Microsoft as it builds products for companies looking to harness the power of the technology.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/nea-backs-ai-startup-sana-with-55m-news/
