An application that helps people and teams in the world of work simplify their task lists – ideally by organizing and performing part of the work for them – has remained one of the unresolved objectives in business technology. Lean into AI, above battle scars of once by building Google Wave, a startup called Tana Think that it fell in love with the way of reaching it.
Tana is now emerging from stealth, announcing funding of $ 25 million from an interesting list of donors to start.
Tana is essentially part of the automated lists manufacturer and notes lessee, the application adapter in part and the organizer in part. He can listen to conversations (for example on the zoom) or the vocal memos directed towards Tana himself, transcribe them and transform them into elements of action. It then works on this subject, in which the user could have integrated it, to create lists, spreadsheets, updates of the web page and more.
It also has a functionality which he calls “Supertag”, which the company describes as modeled on object -oriented programming which “turns unstructured into structured information in seconds”.
Tana’s idea is that she will improve over time because she takes more data and her team builds future iterations.
“We are building a graph of knowledge,” said CEO Tarjei Vassbotn in an interview. Tana is a large river with fast flow in Norway, and Vassbotn said that the startup was named after her. “Tana is an information river,” he said.
Intended both on individuals and teams, TANA aims to help create, then work with the data and the subsequent action elements that its users generate.
“Everything you do, whether it’s about talking to your phone or having a meeting or writing your own notes, everything is automatically organized and connected so that our AI can work,” said Vassbotn.
There is already a momentum behind the startup. At the rear of a beta version and popular closed word of mouth, Tana says that he has already managed to recover 160,000 users on a waiting list, with a high concentration of large companies. (The waiting list will start to open today.)
Tana says that 30,000 people have used and tested its closed beta version over nine months, and it has raised 24,000 users in a community of Tana Slack.
The other momentum is behind the scenes. Tana has its registered office in Palo Alto and has a development and operations office in Norway, with three Norwegian co -founders. Vassbotn and Grim Iversen (CPO) are ancient googlers, and significantly, Iversen was one of the elderly people building Google Wave, which also aimed to solve the problem of tasks and collaboration. They are joined by COO Olav Kriken, who built a series of digital companies in Norway.
The three are well connected and collected $ 25 million in two tranches. Tola Capital, a venture capital company which focuses on corporate software fueled by AI, runs the last series A of $ 14 million, with the participation of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northzone, Alliance VC and Firstminute Capital .
The seed series of $ 11 million has seen the investment of Famiglia (which is now part of General Catalyst), the co-founder of Google Maps Lars Rasmussen, the co-founder of Dropbox Arash Ferdowsi, the founder of the Siqi Chen track, and the founder of Datadog Pomel, between two dozen others.
Providential investors are all remarkable for their own efforts to create better productivity tools.
Rasmussen, in particular, is a software legend. At Google, he founded and directed Google Maps, which gave him the green light to try the company’s productivity with the ultimately unhappy Google wave.
Rasmussen then moved to Facebook to work on research and construction and launch the own efforts of the social network to try to solve this problem with another application now disappeared called workplace. For several years, he has been working on providential startups and investments. In an interview, he said that Aversen was part of a handful of talented people he met over the years that he would be willing to support “almost whatever happens”.
“Grim actually launched part of [the Tana] Ideas for Google Wave, but we never had time to build them, “said Rasmussen.
The fact is that many talented manufacturers have tried to conquer the enigma of efficiency / productivity in company software, but none has fully worked as hoped. Even the so-called Slack email killer finally transformed the receipt box overwhelmed into a swollen of another type of notifications.
The founders of Tana are part of this complicated story. Now their conviction is that the circle can finally be completed with a careful AI application.
It was not a quick process, nor where they presumed working in a vacuum without other competitors. The company met for the first time in 2020 and spent time trying to find the best approach to create what it was considering.
“We started to build our own models for everything,” said Vassbotn. “But when GPT-3 came out, we realized that it would be a race among many players.” Many players trying to create productivity tools, he said, but also those who build major language models.
The company quickly pivoted, “to make sure that we could support any model in the universe, basically, and put all our efforts there,” continued Vassbotn. “It seems easy, but it’s quite difficult when you are dealing with a graph of knowledge, where things should be precise.” Hence the long period of almost four years between the foundation and the launch of the closed beta version.
Currently, he said, Tana is mainly associated with Openai to supply her natural language treatment, “but we also use Anthropic and Grok, and we have local models operating on your computer according to open-source models . “
AI is used at Tana not only to ingest and process information, but also to understand where to send information and what to do with it.
“I think Tana as a catalog of tools,” he said, believing that it is now integrated into 50 different tools (such as Zoom), which also build their own AI functionality. “If all these tools have their own AI agent, how will he devil will collaborate?” So you end up copying and paste and having disparate information that is not synchronized everywhere. This is sort of the basic problem that we are trying to solve. »»
There will inevitably be a certain number of companies, including existing managers in note and productivity areas such as the concept, which can also consider how to build an assistant propelled by AI to wrap everything we do when we are in a keyboard or screen.
Tana has a long way to go before he is in the “It Just Works” stage. Kriken said that, for example, Tana is “probably the best for technology professionals” who are ready to do a little DIY so that the product behaves how they want. “But below, we really believe that this is a paradigm shift in the way we work with information. We are considering Tana used by all knowledge workers. »»
Investors are convinced that it is worth a bet. “I meet a lot of productivity companies and I am in space,” said Sheila Gulati, founder and director general of Tola Capital, in an interview. “But it’s a miraculous experience. I use it to manage our company VC. It is a market that will have real competition and players who want to win, but this team has a high level of commitment to conducting experience. It is a long game, and their vision of productivity is completely different. »»
