Tana snaps up $25M as its AI-powered knowledge graph for work racks up a 160k+ waitlist

An app that helps people and teams in the working world to simplify their task lists by organizing and doing part of the work for them and to do one of the unsolved goals in business technology. Leaning to AI, on top of combat scars from once building Google Wave, called a startup Tana believes it has squatted the code to achieve it.

Tana now comes from Stealth and for the first time announces $ 25 million in financing of an interesting list of backers to start.

Tana is essentially part of the building of the automated list and note Taker, Part Application Enabler and partial organizer. It can listen to conversations (for example about Zoom) or speech memos aimed at Tana itself, transcribe and change into action -items. Then it works, depending on what the user has integrated, to make lists, spreadsheets, webpage updates and more.

It also has a function that calls the ‘super tag’, which the company describes as modeled on object -oriented programming that ‘transforms in seconds unstructured into structured information’.

Tana’s idea is that it will improve over time because it takes on more data and as the team builds up future iterations.

“We are building a knowledge graph,” said CEO Tarjei Vassbotn in an interview. Tana is a large fast -flowing river in Norway, and Vassbotn said the startup called itself about it. “Tana is a river of information,” he said.

Tana is aimed at both individuals and teams and wants to help in creating and working with the data and subsequent action -items that generate its users.

“Everything you do, whether it is about your phone or a meeting or write your own notes, it is all automatically organized and connected so that our AI can work,” said Vassbotn.

There is already a momentum behind the startup. On the back of a popular closed beta and mouth -to -mouth advertising, Tana claims that it has already picked up 160,000 users on a waiting list, with a heavy concentration of large companies. (The waiting list starts to open today.)

Tana says that around 30,000 people have been closed and tested for nine months, and it has collected 24,000 users in a Tana Slack community.

The other momentum is behind the scenes. Tana has his head office in Palo Alto and has a Development and Operations Office in Norway, with three Norwegian co-founders. Vassbotn and Grim Iversen (CPO) are ex-Googler, and considerable Iversen was one of the seniors that Google Wave built, who was also aimed at solving the task and cooperation problem. They are accompanied by COO Olav Kriken, who has built a series of digital companies in Norway.

The three are well connected and have collected $ 25 million in two tranches. Tola Capital, a VC company that focuses on AI-driven Enterprise software, leads the most recent series A of $ 14 million on a $ 100 million post-money appreciation, with participation of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northzone, Alliance VC and Firstminute Capital.

The seed round of $ 11 million saw investments by La Famiglia (now part of general catalyst), co-founder of Google Maps Lars Rasmussen, co-founder of Dropbox Arash Ferdowsi, designer of the catwalk Siqi Chen, and Dataadog founder Olivier Pomel, Among almost two dozen others.

The angel investors are all remarkable for their own efforts to build better productivity tools.

Rasmussen in particular is a software legend. At Google he founded and led Google Maps, who gave him the green light to try his hand on the productivity of the Enterprise with the ultimately fatal Google Wave.

Rasmussen then moved to Facebook to work on searching and to build and launch their own efforts of the social network to try to resolve this problem with another in the evenly -as -they -in -deficiency app called Workplace. In recent years he has worked on Startups and Angel Investing. In an interview he said that Iversen was one of a select handful of talented people he met over the years that he would be willing to “virtually what happens”.

“Grim actually threw some [the Tana] Ideas for Google Wave, but we never had time to build them, “said Rasmussen.

The fact is that many talented builders have tried to conquer the efficiency/productivity conund in business software, but nobody has worked considerably as hoped. Even Slack’s so-called e-mail killer eventually turned the overflowing inbox into one blown -up of a different kind of reports.

The founders of Tana are part of that complicated history. Now their conviction is that the circle can finally be completed with a careful application of AI.

That has not been a fast process, nor a process in which they assumed that they work in a vacuum without other competitors. The company came together for the first time in 2020 and spent time trying to find out the best approach to create what it had in mind.

“We started building our own models for everything,” said Vassbotn. “But when GPT-3 came out, we realized that this will be a race among many players.” Many players who try to build productivity tools, he said, but also those who build large language models.

The company turned quickly, “to ensure that we could support every model in the universe, in principle, and could put all our efforts in it,” Vassbotn continued. “That sounds simple, but it is quite difficult if you are dealing with a knowledge graph, where things should be exactly.” Hence the long period of almost four years between established and launching the closed beta.

Currently, he said, Tana mainly works with OpenAI to provide the natural language processing with electricity, “but we also use anthropic and grock, and we have some local models that run on your computer based on open-source models.”

AI is not only used in Tana to take and process information, but also to understand where you can send information and what you should do with it.

“I think of Tana as a tool catalog,” he said, estimates that it now integrates with 50 different tools (such as Zoom), all of which also build their own AI functionality. “If all those tools have their own AI agent, how the hell can they work together? So you are actually just copied and pasted and you have inaugural information that is not synchronous everywhere. That is a kind of core problem that we try to solve. “

There will inevitably be a number of companies, including existing leaders in the notes and productivity rooms such as Notion, who may also consider how to build an AI assistant to wrap everything we do when we are at a keyboard or a screen.

Tana has a way to go before it is “it just works” in the stage. For example, Tana said that Tana “is probably the best for technical Savvy professionals” who are willing to do a little tinkering to let the product worn how they want it. “But along the line we really believe that this is a paradigm shift in how we work with information. We imagine that Tana is used by all knowledge workers. “

Investors are convinced that it is worth a bet. “I meet many productivity companies and have been to space,” said Sheila Gulati, founder and director of Tola Capital, in an interview. “But this is a wonderful experience. I use it to run our VC company. This is a market that will have real competition and players who want to win, but this team has a high level of dedication to stimulate experience. This is a long game and their vision of productivity is completely different. ”