An app that helps individuals and groups within the working world simplify their to-do lists — ideally by organising and doing a few of the work for them — has remained one of many unsolved objectives in enterprise expertise. Leaning into AI, on prime of battle scars from as soon as constructing Google Wave, a startup referred to as Tana believes it’s cracked the code on tips on how to attain it.
Tana is now rising from stealth, saying $25 million in funding from an fascinating checklist of backers to get began.
Tana is basically half automated-list builder and word taker, half utility enabler, and half organizer. It will probably take heed to conversations (for instance over Zoom) or voice memos directed to Tana itself, transcribe them and switch them into motion objects. It then works on that, relying on what the person may need built-in it with, to create lists, spreadsheets, net web page updates and extra.
It additionally has a characteristic it calls “Supertag,” which the corporate describes as modelled on object-oriented programming that “transforms unstructured to structured data in seconds.”
Tana’s thought is that it’ll enhance over time because it takes on extra knowledge and as its group builds future iterations.
“We’re constructing out a data graph,” stated CEO Tarjei Vassbotn in an interview. Tana is a significant fast-flowing river in Norway, and Vassbotn stated that the startup named itself after it. “Tana is a river of data,” he stated.
Aimed toward each people in addition to groups, Tana goals to assist create after which work with the info and subsequent motion objects that its customers generate.
“Every little thing that you simply do, whether or not it’s speaking to your telephone or having a gathering or writing your individual notes, it’s all robotically organized and linked collectively in order that our AI can work,” Vassbotn stated.
There’s already some momentum behind the startup. On the again of a well-liked closed beta and phrase of mouth, Tana claims it has already managed to choose up 160,000 customers on a waitlist, with a heavy focus from massive enterprises. (The waitlist will begin to open at the moment.)
Tana says some 30,000 individuals used and examined its closed beta over 9 months, and it’s amassed 24,000 customers on a Tana Slack group.
The opposite momentum is behind the scenes. Tana is headquartered in Palo Alto and has a growth and operations workplace in Norway, with three Norwegian co-founders. Vassbotn and Grim Iversen (CPO) are ex-Googlers, and considerably, Iversen was one of many senior individuals constructing Google Wave, which additionally aimed to unravel the to-do and collaboration drawback. They’re joined by COO Olav Kriken, who has constructed a string of digital firms in Norway.
The three are well-connected and have raised $25 million in two tranches. Tola Capital, a VC agency that focuses on AI-powered enterprise software program, is main the newest $14 million Sequence A, with participation from Lightspeed Enterprise Companions, Northzone, Alliance VC, and firstminute capital.
The seed spherical of $11 million noticed funding from La Famiglia (now a part of Normal Catalyst), Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, Runway founder Siqi Chen, and Datadog founder Olivier Pomel, amongst practically two dozen others.
The angel buyers are all notable for their very own efforts to construct higher productiveness instruments.
Rasmussen, particularly, is a software program legend. At Google he based and ran Google Maps, which gave him the inexperienced gentle to strive his hand at enterprise productiveness with the finally ill-fated Google Wave.
Rasmussen then moved to Fb to work on search and construct and launch the social community’s personal effort to attempt to repair this drawback with one other now-defunct app referred to as Office. For the final a number of years, he’s been engaged on startups and angel investing. In an interview, he stated that Iversen was considered one of a choose handful of gifted individuals he’s met through the years that he can be keen to again “just about it doesn’t matter what.”
“Grim truly pitched a few of [the Tana] concepts for Google Wave, however we by no means had time to construct them,” Rasmussen stated.
The actual fact is that many gifted builders have tried to overcome the effectivity/productiveness conundrum in enterprise software program, but none have fairly labored as hoped. Even Slack’s so-called electronic mail killer has, in the long run, turned the overstuffed inbox right into a bloated burden of a special form of notifications.
Tana’s founders are a part of that sophisticated historical past. Now, their perception is that the circle can lastly be accomplished with cautious utility of AI.
That’s not been a fast course of, nor one the place they presumed to be working in a vacuum with no different rivals. The corporate first got here collectively in 2020 and hung out making an attempt to determine the perfect strategy to create what it envisioned.
“We began out constructing our personal fashions for all the things,” Vassbotn stated. “However when GPT-3 got here out, we realized that that is going to be a race amongst many gamers.” Many gamers which might be making an attempt to construct productiveness instruments, he stated, but in addition these constructing massive language fashions.
The corporate rapidly pivoted, “to be sure that we may help any mannequin within the universe, principally, and put all of our efforts into that,” Vassbotn continued. “That sounds simple, but it surely’s fairly laborious while you’re coping with a data graph, the place issues must be exact.” Therefore the lengthy interval of practically 4 years between being based and launching the closed beta.
Presently, he stated, Tana is partnering primarily with OpenAI to energy its pure language processing, “however we additionally use Anthropic and Grok, and we’ve some native fashions working in your laptop based mostly off of open-source fashions.”
AI is used at Tana not simply to ingest and course of data but in addition to know the place to ship data and what to do with it.
“I consider Tana as a software catalog,” he stated, estimating that it now integrates with 50 totally different instruments (akin to Zoom), all of that are additionally constructing their very own AI performance. “If all of these instruments have their very own AI agent, how on earth are they going to have the ability to collaborate? So that you’re principally simply ending up copying and pasting and having disparate data that’s out of sync in all places. That’s form of the core drawback we’re making an attempt to unravel.”
There are inevitably going to be various firms, together with present leaders within the note-taking and productiveness areas like Notion, who might also be contemplating tips on how to construct an AI-powered assistant to wrap round all the things we do after we’re at a keyboard or a display screen.
Tana has a methods to go earlier than it’s on the “it simply works” stage. Kriken stated that, for instance, Tana is “in all probability finest for tech savvy professionals” who’re keen to do some tinkering to get the product to behave how they need it. “However down the road, we actually consider that this can be a paradigm shift in how we work with data. We envision Tana utilized by all data staff.”
Traders are satisfied it’s value a wager. “I meet loads of productiveness firms and have been within the house,” Sheila Gulati, founder and managing director of Tola Capital, stated in an interview. “However this can be a miraculous expertise. I exploit it to run our VC agency. It is a market that may have actual competitors and gamers who wish to win, however this group has a excessive stage of dedication to drive the expertise. It is a lengthy recreation, and their imaginative and prescient of productiveness is totally totally different.”