Tana Emerges from Stealth with $25M Funding for AI-Powered Productivity Platform

Productivity startup Tana launches with $25M in funding - SiliconANGLE

The company, which maintains offices in Palo Alto, California and Norway, raised the capital over two rounds. The most recent investment was a $14 million Series A deal that reportedly valued Tana at $100 million. The company earlier raised $11 million in seed funding from a consortium that included the co-founders of Dropbox Inc., Datadog Inc. and Google Maps. Tana provides a productivity platform that knowledge workers can use to organize information. The software is built around a note-taking tool that enables users to write down or dictate memos. Those memos are saved to a virtual canvas, dubbed the daily page by Tana, that deletes its contents every day to avoid clutter. One of the platform's main selling points is a feature called Supertag. It allows users to break down a note into sentences and attach a tag to each one. The feature automatically organizes tagged sentences into a structured format such as a spreadsheet. An executive could jot down one-sentence summaries of customer feedback forms, then add a "positive" or "negative" label to each summary based on the customer's sentiment. Using the Supertag feature, Tana can organize those tagged feedback summaries in a spreadsheet that displays positive and negative feedback in separate columns. The platform is also capable of formatting information from notes in other ways. Users can, for example, turn a set of to-do items into a timeline that visualizes which task has to be completed by when. Alternatively, Tana can generate a virtual canvas with cards that each contain a summary of a single task. A feature called Tana Publish enables the platform to display longer-form content such as project overviews. It provides the ability to create Google Doc-like pages that can contain not only text but also tables, embedded videos and content hosted in third-party services. Tana has built several artificial intelligence features to speed up its users' work. One such feature can autofill information about to-do items. If a developer creates a note about a newly discovered bug, Tana can autofill details such as the feature that the issue affects and which team member should fix it. The platform's AI feature suite includes a ChatGPT-like chatbot interface for performing research and summarizing documents. Under the hood, Tana mainly relies on OpenAI to power its AI capabilities. Additionally, Tana's desktop client runs open-source language models on the user's computer. Rounding out the platform's feature set is a search bar. It can find all the items that contain a user-specified tag, as well as process more complex queries. A salesperson, for example, could ask Tana to find all the purchases that closed in the third quarter and involved a software product. Before today's launch, Tana piloted its platform through a beta testing program that included over 30,000 participants. More than 160,000 users signed up for the company's waitlist. Tana says those uses include employees at more than 80% of the Fortune 500.

Tana snaps up $25M, with its AI-powered knowledge graph for work racking up a 160k+ waitlist | TechCrunch

An app that helps people and teams in the working world simplify their to-do lists -- ideally by organising and doing some of the work for them -- has remained one of the unsolved goals in business technology. Leaning into AI, on top of battle scars from once building Google Wave, a startup called Tana believes it's cracked the code on how to reach it. Today, Tana is emerging from stealth, announcing $25 million in funding from an interesting list of backers to get started. At its most basic, Tana is part automated-list builder and note taker, part application enabler, and part organiser. It can listen to conversations (for example over Zoom) or voice memos directed to Tana itself, transcribing them and turns them into action items. It then starts to work on that, depending on what you the user might have integrated with it for the purpose, to create lists, spreadsheets, web page updates and more. It also has a feature it calls "Supertag," which it describes as modelled on Object-oriented programming that "transforms unstructured to structured information in seconds." Tana's ambitious idea is that it will improve over time, as it takes on more data, and as its team builds future iterations of the platform. "We are building out a knowledge graph," said CEO Tarjei Vassbotn in an interview. Tana is a major fast-flowing river in Norway and Vassbotn said that the startup named itself after it. "Tana is a river of information," he said. Aimed at both individuals as well as teams of users -- beta users included engineering, design, content creation, product and management teams -- the idea is that Tana helps create and then work with the data and subsequent action items that its users are generating over the course of a normal day. "Everything that you do, whether it's talking to your phone or having a meeting or writing your own notes, it all is automatically organized and connected together so that our AI can work." Out of the gates, there is already some momentum behind the startup. On the back of a popular closed beta and word of mouth, Tana claims that it has already managed to pick up 160,000 users on a waitlist, with a heavy concentration from large enterprises. (That list will start to open today.) Tana says that it's had some 30,000 people using and testing its closed beta, which it launched about nine months ago; and it's amassed 24,000 users on a Tana Slack community -- Slack, coincidentally, being another effort to make working more efficient. The other momentum is behind the scenes. Tana is headquartered in Palo Alto and has a development and operations office in Norway, with three Norwegian co-founders. Vassbotn and Grim Iversen (CPO) are ex-Googlers. Significantly, Iversen had been one of the senior people building Google Wave, another of the efforts to solve the to-do and collaboration problem. They are joined by a third co-founder, COO Olav Kriken, who has built a string of digital companies in the country. The three are well-connected and have raised $25 million in two tranches. In the most recent Series A for $14 million, Tola Capital, a VC that focuses on AI-powered enterprise software, is leading with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northzone, Alliance VC, and firstminute capital. The seed round of $11 million had backing from La Famiglia (now part of General Catalyst), Lars Rasmussen, co-founder of Dropbox Arash Ferdowsi, Runway founder Siqi Chen, and Datadog founder Olivier Pomel among nearly two dozen others. The angels are all notable for their own efforts to build better productivity tools, some multiple times. Rasmussen in particular is a software legend. At Google he founded and ran Google Maps, which gave him the green light to then try his hand at enterprise productivity, with the ultimately ill-fated Google Wave. Rasmussen then moved to Facebook to found and launch the social network's own effort to try to fix this problem, another now-defunct app called Facebook at Work. For the last several years, he's been working on startups and angel investing. In an interview, he said that Iversen was one of a select handful of talented people he's met over the years that he would be willing to back, "pretty much no matter what." "Grim actually pitched some of [the Tana] ideas for Google Wave, but we never had time to to build them," Rasmussen said. The fact is that many talented builders have tried to conquer efficiency/productivity conundrum in business software, yet all of them have not quite worked as hoped. Even Slack's so-called email killer has, in the end, turned the overstuffed inbox into a burden of a notification kind. Tana's founders are part of that complicated history. Now, their belief is that the circle can finally by completed through careful application of AI. That's not been a quick process, nor one where they presumed to be working in a vacuum with no other competitors. The company first came together in 2020 and spent time trying to figure out the best approach to create what it envisioned. "We started out building our own models for everything," Vassbotn said. "But when GPT3 came out, we realized that this is going to be a race among many players." Many players trying to build productivity, he said, but also those building Large Language Models. The company quickly pivoted, "to make sure that we could support any model in the universe, basically, and put all of our efforts into that," Vassbotn continued. "That sounds easy, but it's pretty hard when you're dealing with a knowledge graph, where things needs to be precise." Hence the long period of nearly four years between being founded and launching the closed beta. Currently, he said, Tana is partnering primarily with OpenAI to power its natural language processing, "but we also use Anthropic and Grok, and we have some local models running on your computer based off of open source models." AI is used at Tana not just to ingest and process information but also to understand where to send information, what to do with it. "I think of Tana as a tool catalog," he said, estimating that it's now integrating with around 50 different tools (such as Zoom), all of which themselves are also building their own AI functionality to make work for users a little easier. "If all of those tools have their own AI agent, how on earth are they going to be able to collaborate? So you're basically just ending up copying and pasting and having disparate information that is out of sync everywhere. And that is sort of the core problem that we're trying to solve." There are inevitably going to be a number of companies, including existing leaders in the note-taking and productivity spaces like Notion, that will also be considering how to build an AI-powered assistant to wrap around everything we do when we're at a keyboard or a screen. And Tana has a ways to go before it's at the "it just works" stage. Kriken, for example, that today, Tana is "probably best for tech savvy professionals" who are willing to do a little tinkering to get the product to behave how they want it. "But down the line, we really believe that this is a paradigm shift in how we work with information. We envision Tana used by all knowledge workers." Investors are convinced it's worth a bet. "I meet a lot of productivity companies and have been in the space," Sheila Gulati, founder and managing director of Tola Capital said in an interview. "But this is a miraculous experience. I use it to run our VC firm. This is a market that will have real competition and players who want to win but the this team has a high level of commitment to drive the experience. This is a long game, and their vision of productivity is completely different."