{"id":824186,"date":"2025-02-04T00:12:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-04T06:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/04\/tana-snaps-up-25m-with-its-ai-powered-knowledge-graph-for-work-racking-up-a-160k-waitlist\/"},"modified":"2025-02-04T00:12:00","modified_gmt":"2025-02-04T06:12:00","slug":"tana-snaps-up-25m-with-its-ai-powered-knowledge-graph-for-work-racking-up-a-160k-waitlist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/04\/tana-snaps-up-25m-with-its-ai-powered-knowledge-graph-for-work-racking-up-a-160k-waitlist\/","title":{"rendered":"Tana snaps up $25M, with its AI-powered knowledge graph for work racking up a 160k+ waitlist"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

An app that helps people and teams in the working world simplify their to-do lists \u2014 ideally by organizing and doing some of the work for them \u2014 has remained one of the unsolved goals in business technology. Leaning into AI, on top of battle scars <\/a>from once building Google Wave, a startup called Tana<\/a> believes it\u2019s cracked the code on how to reach it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tana is now emerging from stealth, announcing for the first time $25 million in funding from an interesting list of backers to get started.<\/p>\n

Tana is essentially part automated-list builder and note taker, part application enabler, and part organizer. It can listen to conversations (for example over Zoom) or voice memos directed to Tana itself, transcribe them and turn them into action items. It then works on that, depending on what the user might have integrated it with, to create lists, spreadsheets, web page updates and more.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It also has a feature it calls \u201cSupertag,\u201d which the company describes as modeled on object-oriented programming that \u201ctransforms unstructured to structured information in seconds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tana\u2019s idea is that it will improve over time as it takes on more data and as its team builds future iterations.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are building out a knowledge graph,\u201d 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. \u201cTana is a river of information,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Aimed at both individuals as well as teams, Tana aims to help create and then work with the data and subsequent action items that its users generate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything that you do, whether it\u2019s talking to your phone or having a meeting or writing your own notes, it is all automatically organized and connected together so that our AI can work,\u201d Vassbotn said.<\/p>\n

There is already some momentum behind the startup. On the back of a popular closed beta and word of mouth, Tana claims it has already managed to pick up 160,000 users on a waitlist, with a heavy concentration from large enterprises. (The waitlist will start to open today.)<\/p>\n

Tana says some 30,000 people used and tested its closed beta over nine months, and it\u2019s amassed 24,000 users on a Tana Slack community.<\/p>\n

The other momentum is behind the scenes. Tana is headquartered in Palo Alto and has a development\u00a0and operations office in Norway, with three Norwegian co-founders. Vassbotn and Grim Iversen (CPO) are ex-Googlers, and significantly, Iversen was one of the senior people building Google Wave, which also aimed to solve the to-do and collaboration problem. They are joined by COO Olav Kriken, who has built a string of digital companies in Norway.<\/p>\n

The three are well-connected and have raised $25 million in two tranches. Tola Capital, a VC firm that focuses on AI-powered enterprise software, is leading the most recent $14 million Series A at a $100 million post-money valuation, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northzone, Alliance VC, and firstminute capital.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The seed round of $11 million saw investment from La Famiglia (now part of General Catalyst), Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, Runway founder Siqi Chen, and Datadog founder Olivier Pomel, among nearly two dozen others.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The angel investors are all notable for their own efforts to build better productivity tools.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rasmussen, in particular, is a software legend. At Google he founded and ran Google Maps, which gave him the green light to try his hand at enterprise productivity with the ultimately ill-fated Google Wave<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rasmussen then moved to Facebook to work on search, and build and launch<\/a> the social network\u2019s own effort to try to fix this problem with another now-defunct app<\/a> called Workplace. For the last several years, he\u2019s been working on startups and angel investing. In an interview, he said that Iversen was one of a select handful of talented people he\u2019s met over the years that he would be willing to back \u201cpretty much no matter what.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cGrim actually pitched some of [the Tana] ideas for Google Wave, but we never had time to build them,\u201d Rasmussen said.<\/p>\n

The fact is that many talented builders have tried to conquer the efficiency\/productivity conundrum in business software, yet none have quite worked as hoped. Even Slack\u2019s so-called email killer has<\/a>, in the end, turned the overstuffed inbox into a bloated burden<\/a> of a different kind of notifications.<\/p>\n

Tana\u2019s founders are part of that complicated history. Now, their belief is that the circle can finally be completed with careful application of AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe started out building our own models for everything,\u201d Vassbotn said. \u201cBut when GPT-3 came out, we realized that this is going to be a race among many players.\u201d Many players that are trying to build productivity tools, he said, but also those building large language models.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The company quickly pivoted, \u201cto make sure that we could support any model in the universe, basically, and put all of our efforts into that,\u201d Vassbotn continued. \u201cThat sounds easy, but it\u2019s pretty hard when you\u2019re dealing with a knowledge graph, where things need to be precise.\u201d Hence the long period of nearly four years between being founded and launching the closed beta.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Currently, he said, Tana is partnering primarily with OpenAI to power its natural language processing, \u201cbut we also use Anthropic and Grok, and we have some local models running on your computer based off of open source models.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI is used at Tana not just to ingest and process information but also to understand where to send information and what to do with it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think of Tana as a tool catalog,\u201d he said, estimating that it now integrates with 50 different tools (such as Zoom), all of which are also building their own<\/a> AI functionality. \u201cIf all of those tools have their own AI agent, how on earth are they going to be able to collaborate? So you\u2019re basically just ending up copying and pasting and having disparate information that is out of sync everywhere. That is sort of the core problem we\u2019re trying to solve.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are inevitably going to be a number of companies, including existing leaders in the note-taking and productivity spaces like Notion, that may also be considering how to build an AI-powered assistant to wrap around everything we do when we\u2019re at a keyboard or a screen.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tana has a ways to go before it\u2019s at the \u201cit just works\u201d stage. Kriken said that, for example, Tana is \u201cprobably best for tech savvy professionals\u201d who are willing to do a little tinkering to get the product to behave how they want it. \u201cBut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Investors are convinced it\u2019s worth a bet. \u201cI meet a lot of productivity companies and have been in the space,\u201d Sheila Gulati, founder and managing director of Tola Capital, said in an interview. \u201cBut 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 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Ingrid Lunden<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An app that helps people and teams in the working world simplify their to-do lists \u2014 ideally by organizing and doing some of the work for them \u2014 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":824187,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37210,22004,46],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-824186","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ai-powered","8":"category-snaps","9":"category-technology"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=824186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/824187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=824186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=824186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=824186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}