Joel Hellermark founded Swedish company Sana AI when he was only 19. Now the AI startup has raised $55 million at a $500 million valuation.

Sana AI/Andreas Johansson

Swedish AI startup Sana was swamped last January. The Stockholm-based team was growing but its team was struggling to field calls and meetings with corporates like German pharma group Merck, trading app Robinhood and Swedish home-appliance maker Electrolux for its AI tools that make sense of sprawling internal databases and tools like Salesforce. These were lucrative accounts but work for large customers was time-consuming and making it hard to find new ones. That’s when Sana’s founder Joel Hellermark flipped the script.

Hellermark’s idea was to create a free version of the AI agent that can draft emails, take meeting minutes and complete simple forms that it was selling to enterprise clients. Six months after launching this free tier around 100,000 new workplaces have signed up. Teams with more than five members pay $30 per user per month. Now Sana has raised $55 million at a $500 million valuation to scale its research lab and to push its commercial expansion in the United States.

“For the next billion AI users, we needed to create a very different sort of user interface,” Hellermark told Forbes. “What’s currently holding companies back is they either have to work with Microsoft, which is extremely cumbersome, or build AI assistants from scratch internally.”

The new round led by venture capital fund NEA is modest by the scale of recent checks landed by AI giants like OpenAI, Anthropic and European rival Mistral but the deal takes Sana’s total funding to over $130 million, making it one of the continent’s best funded AI startups. “There’s uncapped demand,” 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 company back in 2016 with the plan to use artificial intelligence to create personalized workplace training plans. Now his pitch is to plug that technology into internal databases and a sprawl of business apps and software tools to help streamline repetitive tasks for office workers like updating Salesforce notes.

That pits Sana against not only Microsoft’s Copilot tool, enterprise search unicorn Glean, but also a stack of well-funded startups like Harvey, Hebbia, or Co:Helm that have a narrow focus on automating boring jobs for lawyers, financial analysts and doctors respectively. Hellermark’s AI claims to be able to bridge dozens of software tools from Slack to Sharepoint to Salesforce. “What we see from our customers is that they want to have one single solution to integrate all their data, curate it, and then assemble it for different use cases,” says Hellermark.

Hellermark says Sana can plug into any large language model being used by a company and can also use Retrieval-Augmented Generation, a technique that lets them tailor their AI agents with a customer’s internal data.. “There will be a lot of vertical players but we want to be the user interface layer for AI,” he says.

The new round led by NEA doubles Sana’s valuation from when it last raised investment in May 2023. Sana currently has over $20 million of annual recurring revenue but is not yet at breakeven, according to sources close to the company.

“When we first invested Sana was growing nicely but now there’s a real inflection point in growth,” says Scott Sandell, executive chairman of NEA. “I’m a big believer that free is the most powerful business model in the world…it’s a very powerful way to take a market and monetize later.”

Sana has made other strategic moves as well: in September, it acquired Tel Aviv-based AI agent startup CTRL in a previously unreported deal. In July, it hired former Google and Inceptive AI researcher Oscar Täckström as its chief scientist as well as former Apple designer Eric Olmers. “We are bringing the Scandinavian design ethos to enabling companies to move from five internal AI use cases to thousands,” says Hellermark.