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Sana raises $55M at a $500M valuation, acquires workflow automation startup CTRL, and announces new agentic AI features as it builds the ultimate UI for AI

The Swedish AI scaleup is among the world's most well-funded AI companies with over $130M in total funding

STOCKHOLM, Sweden – October 30, 2024 – Sana, the global leader in applying AI to enterprise knowledge, today announced a $55M investment round at a $500M valuation led by NEA. Menlo Ventures and other investors also participated in the round. In addition to the new round, which brings Sana's total funding to over $130M 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 mission is to advance how humans access knowledge with AI. The company first emerged as an AI-powered learning and knowledge platform before introducing its enterprise assistant. Today, Sana’s AI products allow you to index knowledge from all your apps, create new knowledge, and access everything your company knows through search and chat.

Sana has seen surging demand as companies race to deploy generative AI, with customers including Merck, Hinge Health, Electrolux, and Svea Solar. Since launching the Free tier of its assistant in April 2024, which spurred the creation of 100,000 new workspaces in six months, Sana is now introducing a Team tier so smaller organizations can benefit from enterprise-grade AI capabilities.

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.

“We’ve seen countless powerful use cases and areas of efficiency since deploying Sana to our company of 1,500 employees across 20 countries,” said Peter Laurin, CEO at industrial technology market leader Piab. “We’re leveraging our AI assistants to find and compare product information, build sales arguments, support R&D, and much more. We see real operational efficiency, and Sana has already provided us with a quick payback.”

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.

“The UI for AI will go from assistants, to proactive agents, to becoming invisible,” said Hellermark. “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 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.

“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,” said Philip Chopin, Managing Director, NEA UK. “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.”

Unlike Microsoft’s AI tools, Sana is 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. With its Scandinavian design ethos, Sana places exceptional focus on both accuracy and ease of use.

“Sana gives us full control and customization over the AI,” said Peter Jidesjö, Executive Vice President at healthcare solution provider Permobil. “We decide what it has access to, we choose the parameters, and we can tailor it to meet our specific needs for accuracy and quality. Within a few days we were all set up and ready to go. We’ve already seen 15-20% time savings in resolving some of our tech support cases for our customers.”

Sana 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."

In addition to CTRL, Sana welcomes Designer Erik Olmers from Apple and ex-Google AI researcher Oscar Täckström as Chief Scientist.

“NEA first invested in May 2023 and Sana has exceeded our expectations since then,” said Chopin. “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.”

“When knowledge becomes more accessible, progress accelerates,” said Hellermark. “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.”

About Sana

Sana exists to advance how humans access knowledge with AI. Its products are trusted by leading enterprises like Merck, Hinge Health, Electrolux, and Svea Solar. Backed by top-tier investors including NEA, Menlo Ventures, and EQT Ventures, Sana has raised over $130 million to date. Visit lilysw.com or create a free account at sana.ai.

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 more than $25 billion in assets under management, as of June 30, 2024 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 280 portfolio company IPOs and more than 465 mergers and acquisitions. For more information, please visit www.nea.com.

About Menlo Ventures

Menlo Ventures is a venture capital firm that strives to have a positive impact on everything we do. That’s why we support businesses including Abnormal Security, Anthropic, Benchling, Carta, Chime, Harness, Pinecone, Roku, and Uber that are reimagining life and work for the better. Over 48 years, we’ve grown a portfolio that includes more than 80 public companies, over 165 mergers and acquisitions, and currently have $6.2 billion under management. We invest in AI at every stage and in every sector, with expertise in consumer, enterprise, and healthcare. From developing market strategies to creating communities, we provide real impact where entrepreneurs need it most. When we’re in, we’re ALL IN.

About CTRL

CTRL is an AI company committed to driving business growth through agentic workflows in sales, customer support, and customer success. Trusted by industry leaders such as Stripe, Airtable, and Snowflake, CTRL has raised over $9M from prominent investors including LocalGlobe and Earlybird. Ctrl empowers teams to deploy AI easily to accelerate their KPIs.

Sana contact

Lauren Crichton
Marketing Director
lauren@lilysw.com