This Swedish startup has raised $55 million to build an army of AI agents

SSwedish AI startup Sana was flooded last January. The Stockholm-based team grew, but the team struggled to make calls and meetings with companies such as German pharmaceutical group Merck, trading app Robinhood and Swedish home appliance maker Electrolux due to its AI tools that provide insight into the extensive internal databases and tools such as Salesforce. These were lucrative accounts, but the work for large clients was time-consuming and made it difficult to find new ones. That’s when Sana’s founder Joel Hellermark flipped the script.

Hellermark’s idea was to create a free version of the AI ​​agent that can compose emails, take minutes of meetings and fill out simple forms that the company sells to business customers. Six months after the launch of this free tier, approximately 100,000 new workplaces have registered. Teams with more than five members pay $30 per user per month. Now, Sana has raised $55 million at a $500 million valuation to scale its research lab and fuel its commercial expansion in the United States.

“For the next billion AI users, we had to create a very different kind of user interface,” Hellermark told us Forbes. “What’s holding companies back right now is that they either have to work with Microsoft, which is extremely cumbersome, or they have to build AI assistants from scratch in-house.”

The new round led by venture capital fund NEA is modest considering the size of recent checks from AI giants like OpenAI, Anthropic and European rival Mistral, but the deal brings Sana’s total funding to more than $130 million, making it one of become the best-funded AI companies on the continent. startups. “There is unlimited demand,” Hellermark says. “I don’t think there’s ever been a clearer path to the biggest prize in enterprise software.”

Hellermark, a Forbes 30 Under 30 alum, founded the company in 2016 with a plan to use artificial intelligence to create personalized workplace training plans. Now his pitch is to connect that technology to internal databases and a host of business apps and software tools to help streamline repetitive tasks for office workers, such as updating Salesforce notes.

That pits Sana not only against Microsoft’s Copilot tool, enterprise search unicorn Glean, but also against a stack of well-funded startups like Harvey, Hebbia or Co:Helm that focus solely on automating boring jobs for lawyers, financial analysts, respectively. and doctors. . Hellermark’s AI claims to be able to bridge dozens of software tools from Slack to Sharepoint to Salesforce. “What we’re seeing from our customers is that they want a single solution to integrate, manage and then curate all their data for different use cases,” says Hellermark.

Hellermark says Sana can plug into any major language model used by a company and can also use Retrieval-Augmented Generation, a technique that allows them to tailor their AI agents to a customer’s internal data. “There will be a lot of vertical players, but we want to be the user interface layer for AI,” he says.

The new round led by NEA doubles Sana’s valuation from its last investment round in May 2023. Sana currently has more than $20 million in annual recurring revenue but is not yet at breakeven, according to sources close to the company.

“When we first invested, Sana was growing well, but now there is a real inflection point in growth,” said Scott Sandell, executive chairman of NEA. “I’m a big believer that free is the most powerful business model in the world… it’s a very powerful way to capture a market and generate revenue later.”

Sana has also made other strategic moves: In September, it acquired Tel Aviv-based AI agent startup CTRL in a previously unreported deal. In July, it hired former Google and Inceptive AI researcher Oscar Täckström as chief scientist, as well as former Apple designer Eric Olmers. “We bring the Nordic design ethos to enable companies to go from five internal AI use cases to thousands,” says Hellermark.