artificial intelligence digital transformation
Published on : Dec 14, 2022
Following 7x year-over-year growth, Menlo Ventures leads funding round to accelerate US expansion
Sana, the leading AI-powered learning platform, announced the close of its $34M Series B led by Menlo Ventures. Existing investor EQT Ventures also joined the round with several founders and operators. Menlo Ventures' partner JP Sanday joins the board as part of this round. This funding follows a 7x year-over-year increase in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).
Sana was founded with the vision of leveraging artificial intelligence to help organizations learn and share knowledge. To that end, Sana built a category-leading learning platform that enables organizations to consolidate their learning and capture, organize, and personalize all their institutional knowledge.
From personalized learning recommendations to an AI writing assistant that automatically generates content, Sana applies the latest breakthroughs in AI to enhance and optimize the entire learning and knowledge-sharing journey.
Sana's AI-powered semantic search empowers employees to get the knowledge they need from anywhere in their organization. The platform connects and indexes tools like Slack, Salesforce, Notion, LinkedIn Learning, and Google Workplace to provide employees with automatically generated answers in natural language. The result: an end-to-end platform that decreases onboarding time, improves sales efficiency, and grows and retains top talent.
"Now a $30 billion industry, the learning and development market has demanded more sophisticated tools. With a world-class product and incredible team, Sana is uniquely positioned to win the market. They offer two vital benefits to the historically underserved L&D category: the scalability and efficiency of artificial intelligence and the compelling experience of a consumer-grade product," said JP Sanday, Partner at Menlo Ventures.
"The ambitious customers we serve—pioneers like Alan, Svea Solar, Kry/Livi, and Merck—are on a mission to change the world. Sana's job is to accelerate their efforts by ensuring every employee has access to the right knowledge at the right time. By leveraging the power of AI, Sana can unlock organizational knowledge with unprecedented scale and speed, supercharging the organizations we serve," said Joel Hellermark, founder and CEO of Sana.
Sana is now the home for knowledge and learning at digital health company Alan—consolidating a myriad of learning and productivity tools. Today, Alan uses Sana to onboard employees, train sales and customer support reps, and develop their leaders.
"Speed, transparency, and personal growth are key to Alan's culture, and Sana was the only provider able to deliver on all three. Since using the platform, we've decreased our ramp time while boosting learner engagement. We think Sana has set a new standard for what organizations expect from a learning platform. Their tech and UX have leapfrogged the industry," said Filip Lam, Head of People Growth at Alan.
With the new funding, Sana will extend its product development and expand its team across Stockholm, London, and New York offices. The headquarters will remain in Stockholm, where founder and CEO Joel Hellermark founded the company aged 19, six years after teaching himself to code in C.
"Joel's visionary leadership, and his rare combination of being technically skilled and exceptionally ambitious, has enabled him to assemble a world-class team from some of the foremost tech companies. With learning as the foundation of human progress, we believe team Sana has the potential to play an important role in reimagining learning as we know it," said Sandra Malmberg, Director at EQT Ventures.
"Our ambition is to build an internet-scale Library of Alexandria, where more than a billion people can learn about anything and share everything they know," said Hellermark. "We're thrilled to have the support of Menlo Ventures and previous backers on this mission."