Joel Hellermark founded the Swedish company Sana AI when he was just 19 years old. Now the AI startup has raised $55 million at a valuation of $500 million.
Word AI/Andreas Johansson
SSwedish AI startup Sana was flooded last January. The Stockholm-based team was growing, but its team struggled to handle calls and meetings with firms like German pharmaceutical giant Merck, trading app Robinhood and Swedish home appliance maker Electrolux due to its AI tools, which use sprawling internal databases and tools like Salesforce use sensibly. They were lucrative accounts, but working for giant clients was time-consuming and made it difficult to seek out latest ones. Then Sana founder Joel Hellermark flipped the script.
Hellermark’s idea was to develop a free version of the AI agent that might compose emails, create meeting minutes and fill out easy forms, which the corporate sold to enterprise customers. Six months after the introduction of this free level, around 100,000 latest jobs have registered. Teams with greater than five members pay $30 per user per 30 days. Now Sana has raised $55 million, valued at $500 million, to expand its research lab and fuel its industrial expansion within the United States.
“For the next billion AI users, we had to create a completely different kind of user interface,” Hellermark said Forbes. “What’s holding companies back right now is that they either have to work with Microsoft, which is extremely cumbersome, or develop AI assistants in-house from scratch.”
The latest round, led by enterprise capital fund NEA, is modest given the dimensions of recent checks received from AI giants similar to OpenAI, Anthropic and European rival Mistral, however the deal brings Sana’s total funding to over $130 million and makes the corporate one in all the continent’s best-funded AI startups. “The demand is unlimited,” said Hellermark. “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 corporate back in 2016 with a plan to make use of artificial intelligence to create personalized training plans for the workplace. Now his proposal is to include this technology into internal databases and a wide range of business applications and software tools to streamline repetitive tasks for office employees, similar to updating Salesforce notes.
This puts Sana not only against Microsoft’s copilot tool, the enterprise search unicorn Glean, but additionally a lot of well-funded startups similar to Harvey, Hebbia or Co:Helm, which focus exclusively on automating boring jobs for lawyers, financial analysts and doctors concentrate. Hellermark’s AI claims to have the opportunity to bridge dozens of software tools from Slack to Sharepoint to Salesforce. “What we see from our customers is that they want a single solution to integrate all of their data, curate it, and then compile it for different use cases,” says Hellermark.
According to Hellermark, Sana can integrate with any major language model utilized by an organization and also can use Retrieval-Augmented Generation, a way that enables them to adapt their AI agents to a customer’s internal data. “But there will be a lot of vertical players.” We wish to be the user interface layer for AI,” he says.
The latest round, led by NEA, doubles Sana’s valuation since its last investment raise in May 2023. Sana currently has annual recurring revenue of over $20 million but has not yet broken even, in keeping with sources near the corporate.
“When we first invested, Sana was growing well, but now there is a real turning point in growth,” says Scott Sandell, NEA’s chief executive officer. “I firmly believe that free is the most powerful business model in the world…it’s a very powerful way to capture a market and make money later.”
Sana has also made other strategic moves: In September, the corporate acquired Tel Aviv-based AI agent startup CTRL in a previously unreported deal. In July, the corporate hired former Google and Inceptive AI researcher Oscar Täckström and former Apple designer Eric Olmers as chief scientist. “We bring the Scandinavian design ethos to empower companies to go from five internal AI use cases to thousands,” says Hellermark.
