25/04/2024, 09:44 Sana raises $34M for its AI-based knowledge management and learning platform for workplaces

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Ingrid Lunden

@ingridlunden / 10:53 AM Comment

GMT • December 13, 2022

Image Credits: Yuichiro Chino / Getty

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Artificial intelligence is touching every

aspect of how we engage with
information (and much more) these
days. Today, a startup building out a
business based on one particular
application of that — how to apply AI

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/13/sana-raises-34m-for-its-ai-based-knowledge-management-and-learning-platform-for-workplaces/?guccounter=1&guce_refe… 1/16
25/04/2024, 09:44 Sana raises $34M for its AI-based knowledge management and learning platform for workplaces | TechCrunch

to knowledge management in the

workplace — is announcing some
funding as it finds some decent Login
traction for its approach. Sana Labs —
which provides an AI-based platform to
Search
help people manage information at
work, and subsequently to use that
Startups
data as a resource for e-learning within
Venture
the organization — has closed a round
of $34 million after seeing ARR grow Security
seven-fold in the last year. AI
Crypto
Menlo Ventures, the U.S. VC firm, is
Apps
leading the round for Stockholm-based
Sana, with EQT Ventures and a Events
whopping 25 angels and Startup Battlefield
founder/operator individuals also More
participating. This is a Series B that
values Sana at $180 million post-
money.

There are a lot of knowledge

management, enterprise learning and
enterprise search products on the
market today, but what Sana believes it
has struck on uniquely is a platform
that combines all three to work
together: a knowledge management-
meets-enterprise-search-meets-e-
learning platform.

The crux of Sana is a platform and AI

engine that connects to all of the
different apps that an organization uses
in the workplace — Salesforce, e-mail,
Notion, GitHub, Slack, Trello, Asana
and whatever else you might have to

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/13/sana-raises-34m-for-its-ai-based-knowledge-management-and-learning-platform-for-workplaces/?guccounter=1&guce_refe… 2/16
25/04/2024, 09:44 Sana raises $34M for its AI-based knowledge management and learning platform for workplaces | TechCrunch

capture, source or store information

and communicate with others.

All of the data across these apps is Login

ingested and organized automatically

by the Sana platform (AI magic), and Search
maintained as the information inside
those apps changes or expands. Then, Startups
users who want to access information Venture
go to Sana and request it in regular Security
“human” language as you might do in a
AI
search engine. But alongside that, the
Crypto
data is used as the basis of e-learning
Apps
modules for onboarding, training or
professional development — modules Events
created/conceived of either by people Startup Battlefield
in the organization, or by Sana itself. More

This wasn’t the original concept for

Sana, which started with building just
the back-end machine learning engine
to organize information. But Joel
Hellermark, Sana’s CEO and founder,
said that early on the startup was
getting requests for the front end —
the part for people to easily query the
information and use it to build training
and learning materials — so they build
that part, too. The learning can come in
the form of quizzes and polls,
interactive sessions and more, and
when interactive Q&A is generated
around webinars, like some kind of
very resourceful, waste-not-want-not
stew, the outcomes from all those also
get fed into the knowledge base for
future reference.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/13/sana-raises-34m-for-its-ai-based-knowledge-management-and-learning-platform-for-workplaces/?guccounter=1&guce_refe… 3/16
25/04/2024, 09:44 Sana raises $34M for its AI-based knowledge management and learning platform for workplaces | TechCrunch

The mix of knowledge management

with search and e-learning means that
the platform sees very different Login
engagement metrics, said Hellermark.
“Sana is used continuously, which is
Search
very different from a typical e-learning
platform,” he said. “We’re seeing
Startups
weekly and daily active usage” from
Venture
among the tens of thousands of
employees from across the 100 or so Security
businesses that are already using AI
Sana, he added. Crypto
Apps
Events
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Annual Founder Summit Startup Battlefield
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The tech itself is built out and

customized by Sana, but the models,
Hellermark said, come from OpenAI,
which has a “deep partnership” with
Sana, in Hellermark’s words.

“We’ve been using their models from

day one continuously, since before
launch,” he said. That includes GPT,
which — via ChatGPT — has been the
talk of the town among tech and media
folk on chatty platforms like Twitter.
Sana’s approach speaks to the
scalable potential for AI longer term.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/13/sana-raises-34m-for-its-ai-based-knowledge-management-and-learning-platform-for-workplaces/?guccounter=1&guce_refe… 4/16
25/04/2024, 09:44 Sana raises $34M for its AI-based knowledge management and learning platform for workplaces | TechCrunch

“We believe there will be underlying

models from the likes of OpenAI with
the opportunity to fine-tune them for Login
specific domains,” Hellermark added.
“For us, the focus is the user
Search
experience on top of this.”

Hellermark describes himself as a Startups

longtime obsessive about not just the Venture
significance of education, but of the Security
power of AI to make a mark in the
AI
space. But education comes in many
Crypto
forms — content aimed at younger
Apps
people, further education, adult
learning and professional development Events
being just a few of the slices of the pie. Startup Battlefield
More
He said that Sana chose to focus on
the fourth of those for two reasons. The
first is because of the practicality of it
— there isn’t really anything else like it
on the market today, but it’s definitely
something organizations could use,
given the oversupply of useful
information contained within an
organization’s braintrust that works on
an inverse variation: the more of it that
is amassed, the harder it gets to tap
into it.

The second reason for the enterprise

focus is because of the scalability
factor: While education in the more
traditional sense clearly could use tools
for ingesting lots of disparate,
fragmented information and making it
easily accessible and the basis of
learning modules personalized to the

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/13/sana-raises-34m-for-its-ai-based-knowledge-management-and-learning-platform-for-workplaces/?guccounter=1&guce_refe… 5/16
25/04/2024, 09:44 Sana raises $34M for its AI-based knowledge management and learning platform for workplaces | TechCrunch

individual, the fragmentation across

age groups and school districts, let
alone countries and their own specific
Login
curriculums, makes it a more
complicated target — perhaps even
Search
more right now, given the emphasis
we’re seeing from startups, and their
Startups
backers, to focus on projects with
sound unit economics, identifiable (and
Venture

active) customer bases and tech that Security

already works to those ends. AI
Crypto
“The education sector is my biggest
passion because if you solve learning
Apps

you solve everything,” he said. “But Events

from day one we wanted to be a large Startup Battlefield
company and it’s hard to scale that in More
K-12 because you have to adapt to
different countries. Having an
enterprise approach helps us scale and
helps doctors to engineers and product
managers and sales reps and
everyone. We’re able to serve all of
them in over 20 countries.”

Importantly, that’s not to say that this

won’t be a target longer term, or that
the traditional sector of education
wouldn’t or couldn’t be a receptive
customer for technology like this —
from Sana or another startup — in the
longer term.

Another important detail to consider is

how Sana handles the quality of the
information that it sources. How does it
decide — can it decide? — if data that
it sources is correct, and what does it

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/13/sana-raises-34m-for-its-ai-based-knowledge-management-and-learning-platform-for-workplaces/?guccounter=1&guce_refe… 6/16
25/04/2024, 09:44 Sana raises $34M for its AI-based knowledge management and learning platform for workplaces | TechCrunch

do if there are multiple “answers” that

are not consistent with each other?

Login
“That is what knowledge management
is,” Hellermark said in response to the
Search
question. “You can have models that
are just search, but that doesn’t take
Startups
into account the need to verify
Venture
knowledge and create journeys.” He
said that a “structure for verification” is Security
built into the system, which includes AI
people being able to limit what sources Crypto
and other input can be used by Sana, Apps
with customers able choose to Events
designate what information is verified
Startup Battlefield
and accurate, and choose whether
More
users can access information that is
unverified, and to rank information.

It’s not a fully satisfactory answer, to be

honest, especially since accuracy one
of the most persistent issues around
AI: What do you do if it’s not quite
right, or outright wrong, or simply using
bad data?

As with the rest of the rocket ship that

is AI, however, this for now has not
been an issue impeding Sana’s growth.

“Over the past 6+ years, I’ve looked at

almost every single other learning
management system SaaS, and the
best part about Sana is that they are
building a true knowledge
management solution from the ground
up, considering how knowledge is
captured in today’s knowledge

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/13/sana-raises-34m-for-its-ai-based-knowledge-management-and-learning-platform-for-workplaces/?guccounter=1&guce_refe… 7/16
25/04/2024, 09:44 Sana raises $34M for its AI-based knowledge management and learning platform for workplaces | TechCrunch

economy,” said JP Sanday, the Menlo

partner who led this investment.
“Companies are now more distributed,
Login
are being asked to do more with less
and cannot keep up with the pace of
Search
innovation and need to enable all of
their employees. Sana is the only
Startups
platform I have ever seen that can fulfill
this vision.”
Venture
Security
He added that the approach of people AI
both tapping into the database, and Crypto
building content around it, creates a Apps
specific “organizational knowledge
Events
graph” that is more democratized than
Startup Battlefield
what you typically get in organizations.
More
“When I show prospects the product
and they see the content creation
experience as well as the AI
capabilities that help both authors and
learners they immediately know they
are looking at something completely
different — they see how much more
extensible it is and how much more
engagement they get from users,” he
said.

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https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/13/sana-raises-34m-for-its-ai-based-knowledge-management-and-learning-platform-for-workplaces/?guccounter=1&guce_refe… 8/16
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