AI

Sana raises $34M for its AI-based knowledge management and learning platform for workplaces

Comment

Close up brain with a futuristic graphical user interface in network connection space.
Image Credits: Yuichiro Chino (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

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 to knowledge management in the workplace — is announcing some funding as it finds some decent traction for its approach. Sana Labs — which provides an AI-based platform to help people manage information at work, and subsequently to use that data as a resource for e-learning within the organization — has closed a round of $34 million after seeing ARR grow seven-fold in the last year.

Menlo Ventures, the U.S. VC firm, is leading the round for Stockholm-based Sana, with EQT Ventures and a whopping 25 angels and founder/operator individuals also 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 capture, source or store information and communicate with others.

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

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.

The mix of knowledge management with search and e-learning means that the platform sees very different engagement metrics, said Hellermark. “Sana is used continuously, which is very different from a typical e-learning platform,” he said. “We’re seeing weekly and daily active usage” from among the tens of thousands of employees from across the 100 or so businesses that are already using Sana, he added.

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.

“We believe there will be underlying models from the likes of OpenAI with the opportunity to fine-tune them for specific domains,” Hellermark added. “For us, the focus is the user experience on top of this.”

Hellermark describes himself as a longtime obsessive about not just the significance of education, but of the power of AI to make a mark in the space. But education comes in many forms — content aimed at younger people, further education, adult learning and professional development being just a few of the slices of the pie.

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 individual, the fragmentation across age groups and school districts, let alone countries and their own specific curriculums, makes it a more complicated target — perhaps even more right now, given the emphasis we’re seeing from startups, and their backers, to focus on projects with sound unit economics, identifiable (and active) customer bases and tech that already works to those ends.

“The education sector is my biggest passion because if you solve learning you solve everything,” he said. “But from day one we wanted to be a large company and it’s hard to scale that in 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 do if there are multiple “answers” that are not consistent with each other?

“That is what knowledge management is,” Hellermark said in response to the question. “You can have models that are just search, but that doesn’t take into account the need to verify knowledge and create journeys.” He said that a “structure for verification” is built into the system, which includes people being able to limit what sources and other input can be used by Sana, with customers able choose to designate what information is verified and accurate, and choose whether 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 economy,” said JP Sanday, the Menlo partner who led this investment. “Companies are now more distributed, are being asked to do more with less and cannot keep up with the pace of innovation and need to enable all of their employees.  Sana is the only platform I have ever seen that can fulfill this vision.”

He added that the approach of people both tapping into the database, and building content around it, creates a specific “organizational knowledge graph” that is more democratized than what you typically get in organizations.

“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.

More TechCrunch

Jasper Health, a cancer care platform startup, laid off a substantial part of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned.

General Catalyst-backed Jasper Health lays off staff

Live Nation says its Ticketmaster subsidiary was hacked. A hacker claims to be selling 560 million customer records.

Live Nation confirms Ticketmaster was hacked, says personal information stolen in data breach

Featured Article

Inside EV startup Fisker’s collapse: how the company crumbled under its founders’ whims

An autonomous pod. A solid-state battery-powered sports car. An electric pickup truck. A convertible grand tourer EV with up to 600 miles of range. A “fully connected mobility device” for young urban innovators to be built by Foxconn and priced under $30,000. The next Popemobile. Over the past eight years, famed vehicle designer Henrik Fisker…

3 hours ago
Inside EV startup Fisker’s collapse: how the company crumbled under its founders’ whims

Late Friday afternoon, a time window companies usually reserve for unflattering disclosures, AI startup Hugging Face said that its security team earlier this week detected “unauthorized access” to Spaces, Hugging…

Hugging Face says it detected ‘unauthorized access’ to its AI model hosting platform

Featured Article

Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

Using stalkerware is creepy, unethical, potentially illegal, and puts your data and that of your loved ones in danger.

4 hours ago
Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

The design brief was simple: each grind and dry cycle had to be completed before breakfast. Here’s how Mill made it happen.

Mill’s redesigned food waste bin really is faster and quieter than before

Google is embarrassed about its AI Overviews, too. After a deluge of dunks and memes over the past week, which cracked on the poor quality and outright misinformation that arose…

Google admits its AI Overviews need work, but we’re all helping it beta test

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. In…

Startups Weekly: Musk raises $6B for AI and the fintech dominoes are falling

The product, which ZeroMark calls a “fire control system,” has two components: a small computer that has sensors, like lidar and electro-optical, and a motorized buttstock.

a16z-backed ZeroMark wants to give soldiers guns that don’t miss against drones

The RAW Dating App aims to shake up the dating scheme by shedding the fake, TikTok-ified, heavily filtered photos and replacing them with a more genuine, unvarnished experience. The app…

Pitch Deck Teardown: RAW Dating App’s $3M angel deck

Yes, we’re calling it “ThreadsDeck” now. At least that’s the tag many are using to describe the new user interface for Instagram’s X competitor, Threads, which resembles the column-based format…

‘ThreadsDeck’ arrived just in time for the Trump verdict

Japanese crypto exchange DMM Bitcoin confirmed on Friday that it had been the victim of a hack resulting in the theft of 4,502.9 bitcoin, or about $305 million.  According to…

Hackers steal $305M from DMM Bitcoin crypto exchange

This is not a drill! Today marks the final day to secure your early-bird tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 at a significantly reduced rate. At midnight tonight, May 31, ticket…

Disrupt 2024 early-bird prices end at midnight

Instagram is testing a way for creators to experiment with reels without committing to having them displayed on their profiles, giving the social network a possible edge over TikTok and…

Instagram tests ‘trial reels’ that don’t display to a creator’s followers

U.S. federal regulators have requested more information from Zoox, Amazon’s self-driving unit, as part of an investigation into rear-end crash risks posed by unexpected braking. The National Highway Traffic Safety…

Feds tell Zoox to send more info about autonomous vehicles suddenly braking

You thought the hottest rap battle of the summer was between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. You were wrong. It’s between Canva and an enterprise CIO. At its Canva Create event…

Canva’s rap battle is part of a long legacy of Silicon Valley cringe

Voice cloning startup ElevenLabs introduced a new tool for users to generate sound effects through prompts today after announcing the project back in February.

ElevenLabs debuts AI-powered tool to generate sound effects

We caught up with Antler founder and CEO Magnus Grimeland about the startup scene in Asia, the current tech startup trends in the region and investment approaches during the rise…

VC firm Antler’s CEO says Asia presents ‘biggest opportunity’ in the world for growth

Temu is to face Europe’s strictest rules after being designated as a “very large online platform” under the Digital Services Act (DSA).

Chinese e-commerce marketplace Temu faces stricter EU rules as a ‘very large online platform’

Meta has been banned from launching features on Facebook and Instagram that would have collected data on voters in Spain using the social networks ahead of next month’s European Elections.…

Spain bans Meta from launching election features on Facebook, Instagram over privacy fears

Stripe, the world’s most valuable fintech startup, said on Friday that it will temporarily move to an invite-only model for new account sign-ups in India, calling the move “a tough…

Stripe curbs its India ambitions over regulatory situation

The 2024 election is likely to be the first in which faked audio and video of candidates is a serious factor. As campaigns warm up, voters should be aware: voice…

Voice cloning of political figures is still easy as pie

When Alex Ewing was a kid growing up in Purcell, Oklahoma, he knew how close he was to home based on which billboards he could see out the car window.…

OneScreen.ai brings startup ads to billboards and NYC’s subway

SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket could take to the skies for the fourth time on June 5, with the primary objective of evaluating the second stage’s reusable heat shield as the…

SpaceX sent Starship to orbit — the next launch will try to bring it back

Eric Lefkofsky knows the public listing rodeo well and is about to enter it for a fourth time. The serial entrepreneur, whose net worth is estimated at nearly $4 billion,…

Billionaire Groupon founder Eric Lefkofsky is back with another IPO: AI health tech Tempus

TechCrunch Disrupt showcases cutting-edge technology and innovation, and this year’s edition will not disappoint. Among thousands of insightful breakout session submissions for this year’s Audience Choice program, five breakout sessions…

You’ve spoken! Meet the Disrupt 2024 breakout session audience choice winners

Check Point is the latest security vendor to fix a vulnerability in its technology, which it sells to companies to protect their networks.

Zero-day flaw in Check Point VPNs is ‘extremely easy’ to exploit

Though Spotify never shared official numbers, it’s likely that Car Thing underperformed or was just not worth continued investment in today’s tighter economic market.

Spotify offers Car Thing refunds as it faces lawsuit over bricking the streaming device

The studies, by researchers at MIT, Ben-Gurion University, Cambridge and Northeastern, were independently conducted but complement each other well.

Misinformation works, and a handful of social ‘supersharers’ sent 80% of it in 2020

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Okay, okay…

Tesla shareholder sweepstakes and EV layoffs hit Lucid and Fisker