Sana, the Swedish AI scaleup, has announced a $55 million investment round at a $500 million valuation led by venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA).
Sana applies AI to “enterprise knowledge.”
Menlo Ventures and other investors also participated in the round.
In addition to the new round, which brings Sana’s total funding to over $130 million and makes it one of the world’s most well-funded AI companies, the company announced “new AI agentic features” and its acquisition of workflow automation startup CTRL as it “continues building the ultimate user interface for AI in the enterprise.”
Sana’s products are used by companies including Merck, Hinge Health, Electrolux and Svea Solar.
Sana said: “Existing customers are seeing the business value of Sana across multiple use cases, including: 95% time-savings from finding complex product information and up to 90% productivity gains from automating complex workflows for industrial companies; over 60% in time-savings from automating legal admin and 200% increased efficiency for legal firms; and over 10 hours/week time savings in new hire onboarding for internal HR teams.
“Alongside the raise, Sana is announcing new features for organizations to build custom AI agents for any team or workflow, with no coding required. Powered by Sana’s state-of-the-art RAG and its agent solution A-4, these agents will collaborate to solve complex multi-step problems, complete tasks in other apps, and self-critique their output until they’ve resolved the task at hand.”
Sana founder and CEO Joel Hellermark said: “The UI for AI will go from assistants, to proactive agents, to becoming invisible.
“With Sana, we’re taking the first step as companies can now build AI agents that do everything from filling out RFPs and updating sales opportunities in Salesforce based on call notes to answering a myriad of questions about clinical trials.
“We can’t wait to put these advances into the hands of the next billion AI users.”
Sana said it is also launching its next-generation enterprise search “with enhanced ranking across structured and unstructured data, a revamped UI to make creating and interacting with expert AI assistants even easier, and the ability to generate AI avatars from company training and documentation to make knowledge more digestible and engaging.”
Philip Chopin, Managing Director, NEA UK, said: “The most powerful large language models have sparked a once-in-a-lifetime revolution, but they are only as good as the context we give them.
“Organizations need a way to connect these LLMs to vast knowledge repositories and curate their knowledge base in real time. Sana is doing exactly that, and we believe it’s proving to be a game-changer for enterprises.”
Sana describes itself as “large language model and platform agnostic, integrating with a company’s entire tech stack so its assistants and agents can make more informed decisions by drawing on all structured and unstructured data.”
Sana said it will use the new investment to fuel its global go-to-market expansion and accelerate both its AI and experience design R&D. To that end, the scaleup has acquired CTRL, the AI workflow automation startup backed by LocalGlobe and Earlybird and trusted by Stripe, Airtable and Snowflake.
“Sana and CTRL share a vision of augmenting humans with AI,” said Omri Sagzan and Aviv Nahum, founders of CTRL. “We’re excited to join and go beyond knowledge retrieval by deploying AI agents capable of collaborating and solving complex problems end-to-end.”
NEA’s Chopin added: “NEA first invested in May 2023 and Sana has exceeded our expectations since then.
“When it comes to product velocity, customer traction, and talent density, we believe Sana is best-in-class and we are thrilled to continue to support them in building a generational company.”
Hellermark added: “When knowledge becomes more accessible, progress accelerates.
“The most important inventions in history — writing, the Printing Press, the telegraph, Google — all accelerated how we share and spread knowledge. Yet it’s easier to navigate the world’s knowledge than it is to navigate your company’s. Company knowledge is scattered and unstructured. Sana puts everything your company knows at your fingertips.”