Sana raises additional $28M led by NEA to build the universal AI platform for the enterprise

The Swedish-born Sana scaleup becomes one of Europe's most highly funded AI companies with $62M in total Series B funding

STOCKHOLM, May 31, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Sana, the leading AI-powered learning and knowledge platform, announced today it's landed another $28M in an opportunistic investment round led by NEA. Workday Ventures also joined the round. With a combined total of $62M in Series B funding, the Swedish-born scaleup is now one of the most highly funded AI companies.

Sana's mission is to augment human intelligence through artificial intelligence. To that end, the company has built a category-defining product that blends the best of enterprise search, a learning management system, meeting tools, and a knowledge management system into one single platform.

Underpinning this suite of tools is Sana AI, the company's latest release. Sana AI is an omnipresent assistant that can do everything from search across all your company's apps and take actions in response to natural language commands to generating real-time summaries of live meetings and creating entire learning courses from scratch and writing SQL to query your data. In other words, it's like ChatGPT for your company's knowledge.

By augmenting an organization's ability to capture, organize, and access knowledge at every step through AI, Sana enables any team to move faster and be more productive—from sales and customer support teams to product specialists and software engineers.

"At Sana, we believe every organization's mission depends on the collective intelligence of its employees. That intelligence depends on knowledge, yet most institutional knowledge today is scattered across multiple tools, trapped in people's minds, and lost in verbal conversations. AI is the key to solving this problem at scale. By unlocking knowledge for every employee across any organization, we unlock global progress," said Joel Hellermark, Founder and CEO of Sana.
"We're thrilled to have the support from NEA and strategic investors like Workday Ventures on this mission."

Sana wasn't looking for funding when NEA made its proactive offer. The scaleup had a healthy runway having closed a $34M Series B round led by Menlo Ventures last December. One of the reasons for the additional investor interest is commercial performance: Sana has grown its business 3x year over year.

NEA will be represented on Sana's board by CEO Scott Sandell and Managing Director Philip Chopin. Since joining NEA in 1996, Sandell has played a critical role in many industry-transforming businesses, including Robinhood, Salesforce, Tableau Software, and Workday.

"Sana's past track record and current trajectory are exceptional. Thanks to top talent, bold vision, and rare organizational alignment, we believe they've already built a world-class learning and knowledge platform. But what excites us most is where Sana is going next: indexing every form of an organization's functional data through LLMs to become the de-facto AI platform for the enterprise. The use cases for this type of product are endless," said Scott Sandell, CEO at NEA.

In addition to Sana's commercial growth and ambitious team, NEA was impressed by the level of customer advocacy. The platform is used by an impressive client roster of market-leading companies like Merck, Kry/Livi, and Svea Solar—all of whom praise Sana's superior user experience and product velocity.

"Since day one, we've been amazed at Sana's pace of innovation and commitment to addressing customer feedback. The platform is more than a tool—it's become Svea Solar's home for learning and knowledge. We see the latest iteration of Sana AI as a productivity game-changer," said Hanna Manberg, CHRO at Svea Solar.

With the additional funding, Sana will continue expanding its product development and commercial teams across Stockholm, London, and New York offices. Sana's headquarters will remain in Stockholm, where founder and CEO Joel Hellermark founded the company aged 19, six years after teaching himself to code in C.

"Joel is an exceptional founder. This Series B extension is a testament to his technical and commercial prowess and visionary leadership. As we enter the new age of artificial intelligence, we believe the Sana team is well positioned to become one of the world's most successful and impactful AI companies," said Philip Chopin, Managing Director at NEA UK.

About Sana
Sana is an AI-powered learning platform that empowers organizations to find, share, and harness the knowledge they need to achieve their missions. Backed by some of the world's leading investors, operators, and founders, Sana has raised more than $85M to date. The company's headquarters are in Stockholm, Sweden, with offices in London and New York. For more information, head to www.sanalabs.com.

Sana Contact
Jon Lexa
[email protected]

About NEA
New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA) is a global venture capital firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors and geographies. Founded in 1977, NEA has over $25 billion in assets under management, as of March 31, 2023, and invests in technology and healthcare companies at all stages in a company's lifecycle, from seed stage through IPO. The firm's long track record of investing includes more than 270 portfolio company IPOs and more than 450 mergers and acquisitions. For more information, please visit www.nea.com.

SOURCE NEA