Recently, Swedish Edtech company Sana Labs announced the completion of a series B financing, with an additional investment of $28 million from investment institutions. The round, led by DoorDash, Uber and Robinhood backer New Enterprise Associates (NEA), brings Sana Labs' Series B funding to $62 million, with the company currently receiving more than $80 million.
Sana Labs was founded in 2016 by Joel Hellermark when the founder built a team of engineers and designers from tech companies like Spotify to Google. In the first few years, the team devoted itself to the development and research of different marketed products and how they work. In 2019, Sana Labs launched as an all-in-one enterprise learning tool powered by artificial intelligence.
Its AI-driven learning platform, which enables organizations to find, share, and leverage the knowledge they need to complete tasks, enables businesses and employees to personalize online training and upskilling.
The edtech startup has benefited greatly as companies move corporate retraining online and remote work has proliferated. During the pandemic, more than 80,000 healthcare workers in 2,000 hospitals used Sana's platform to improve their skills and learn more about COVID-19 treatment and prevention.
Sana's core purpose is to use AI technology to enhance enterprise training capabilities. Sana focused on designing and leveraging the latest advances in artificial intelligence technology, spending seven years refining this vision. In the past six months, thanks to the progress of artificial intelligence technology, the products and services provided by the company have attracted more investor attention.
Sana Labs said the company believes that enhancing human intelligence is the key to driving global progress. Sana empowers global organizations by enabling employees to learn faster and be more productive. With this fundamental belief in mind, Sana set out to build a superior learning management system two years ago.
Announcing the completion of the financing, the company released its next milestone product: Sana AI, a generative AI tool. Sana AI acts as an intelligent co-pilot that integrates seamlessly with the company's knowledge base. This AI assistant offers a range of features, including the platform that enables businesses to use AI to index corporate information, perform tasks such as course creation, allowing employees to query and search, summarize and translate information, and more.
The capabilities of generative AI models are directly affected by the context they receive. By integrating Sana with an organization's suite of applications, users can unlock the potential of AI-assisted to increase productivity and save time.
Joel Hellermark, founder of Sana Labs, says that within the company, information is often scattered across silos, buried in systems, and locked down in different formats, making it inaccessible to employees when they need it most. The 26-year-old hopes to help businesses solve this problem with his learning platform, Sana.
"It's really a knowledge platform for businesses. Think of it as the Library of Alexandria, all the questions you might want to answer, all the knowledge of the company, everything on this platform," the founder said.
Current Sana's software uses eight different AI systems and large-scale language models, including OpenAI's Whisper, GPT-4 and Dall-E, Anthropic's Claude and Google's PaLM, to select the right model based on what best suits a particular task, such as transcription, summarization, or creation.
The platform serves as the interface between its licensed LLM at one end and its access to company information and data at the other. That's because as more employees rely on generative AI to extract or generate information, they also run the risk of unknowingly entering proprietary company information into AI systems — leading to uncertainty about how the system will use that data without the company's knowledge. The Sana system protects the privacy of company-specific information for this purpose.
According to the founders, Sana can search all of the company's applications, such as Slack, GitHub, Google Workspace and Notion, and return results within 100 milliseconds. "We're using a lightweight model because we want to load the user's answer in milliseconds, and we need to figure out exactly what he wants to do while the user types the answer."
With its suite of AI tools, Sana competes with startups like enterprise search unicorn Glean, enterprise AI startup Typeface, and Adept, which offers AI-based assistants to perform tasks.
Sana currently sells its learning management system to the company's human resources department. It has about 200 corporate customers in industries such as healthcare and banking — including fintech platform Klarna, cleaning company Hemfrid and pharmaceutical brand Merck — as well as 300,000 individual users. With offices in London, Stockholm and New York, Sana plans to use additional funds for product development and expand its team of 70 employees.
Sana's founder, Hellermark, started programming at age 13 and founded a video recommendation company at age 14. After working for a digital advertising agency, he founded Sana (then known as Sana Labs) at the age of 19 as his artificial intelligence research lab. Hellermark learned how to code through a publicly available Stanford course, and now, with SANA's AI capabilities, his goal is to increase employee productivity by improving their ability to learn and access information.
"Imagine every person on the planet with a polymath in their pocket who has all the knowledge in the world, all your knowledge, that enhances your ability to solve any task, that can teach you anything," Hellermark said.
At the time of the earliest funding, Hellermark said it believed lifelong learning in the workplace would become standard. "We believe that every company with more than 50 employees in the future will have a learning platform... We are leaders in our field and are changing the way the world learns. ”
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