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An application that helps people and teams in the working world simplifies their lists of pending tasks, ideally organizing and making part of the work for them, has remained one of the objectives not resolved in business technology. Inclined to AI, in addition to the battle scars at once building Google Wave, a startup called She He believes that he has deciphered the code on how to reach it.
Tana is now emerging from stealth, announcing $ 25 million in funds from an interesting list of sponsors to begin with.
Tana is essentially part of the constructor of the automated list and the notes, the pairs application enable and the parts organizer. You can listen to conversations (for example about zoom) or voice memorandums aimed at Tana itself, transcribe them and turn them into elements of action. Then it works on that, depending on what the user could have integrated, to create lists, spreadsheets, updates of the website and more.
It also has a characteristic that calls “Supertag”, which the company describes as modeled in object -oriented programming that “transforms unstructured to structured information in seconds.”
The idea of Tana is that he will improve over time, since he takes more data and his team builds future iterations.
“We are building a knowledge chart,” said CEO Vassbotn Ceo in an interview. Tana is a great river that flows rapidly in Norway, and Vassbotn said the startup named itself. “Tana is a river of information,” he said.
Aimed at both individuals and teams, Tana aims to help create and then work with subsequent data and action elements generated by their users.
“Everything you do, whether talking with your phone or having a meeting or writing your own notes, everything is organized and connected automatically so that our AI can work,” said Vassbotn.
There is already some impulse behind the startup. Thoroughly of a popular closed beta and mouth mouth, Tana states that he has already managed to pick up 160,000 users in a waiting list, with a strong concentration of large companies. (The waiting list will begin to open today).
Tana says that some 30,000 people used and tested their closed beta for nine months, and has accumulated 24,000 users in a community of Tana Slack.
The other impulse is behind the scene. Tana is based in Palo Alto and has a development and operations office in Norway, with three Norwegian co -founders. Vassbotn and Grim iversen (CPO) are former Googlers, and significantly, Iiversen was one of the elderly who built Google Wave, which also aimed to solve the problem of task and collaboration. They are joined by Coo Olav Krhen, who has built a series of digital companies in Norway.
The three are well connected and have raised $ 25 million in two sections. Tola Capital, a venture capital firm that focuses on the business software with AI, leads the most recent series of $ 14 million, with the participation of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northzone, Alliance VC and Firstminute Capital.
The $ 11 million seed round saw the investment of the Famiglia (now part of the Catalyst General), the co -founder of Google Maps, Lars Rasmussen, the co -founder of Dropbox, Arash Ferdowsi, the founder of the track Siqi Chen and the founder of Datag Olivier Pomel, between almost two other dozen.
All angels are notable for their own efforts to develop better productivity tools.
Rasmussen, in particular, is a software legend. In Google he founded and directed Google Maps, which gave him the green light to try his luck in business productivity with the Google Wave finally challenged.
Rasmussen later moved to Facebook to work in the search and build and launch the effort of the social network to try to solve this problem with another disappeared application called Workplace. In recent years, he has been working on new companies and investments in Angel. In an interview, he said that Iiversen was one of a select handful of talented people who has met over the years that he would be willing to support “practically regardless of what.”
“Grim actually launched some of the ideas (from Tana) for Google Wave, but we never had time to build them,” Rasmussen said.
The fact is that many talented builders have tried to conquer the efficiency/productivity enigma in business software, but none has worked as expected. Even the so -called Slack email killer, in the end, has turned the entrance tray overloaded into a swollen load of a different type of notifications.
The founders of Tana are part of that complicated story. Now, its belief is that the circle can finally be completed with a careful application of AI.
That has not been a fast process, nor one in which they will presume that they work in a vacuum without other competitors. The company met for the first time in 2020 and spent a while trying to discover the best approach to create what it imagined.
“We begin to build our own models for everything,” said Vassbotn. “But when GPT-3 came out, we realized that this will be a race among many players.” Many players trying to build productivity tools, he said, but also those who build large language models.
The company quickly turned: “To make sure we can support any model in the universe, basically, and put all our efforts on that,” Vassbotn continued. “That sounds easy, but it is quite difficult when it comes to a knowledge chart, where things must be precise.” Hence the long period of almost four years between being founded and launching the closed beta.
He currently said, Tana is mainly associated with Openai to feed his natural language processing, “but we also use anthropic and Grok, and we have some local models that are executed on their computer based on open source models.”
The AI is used in Tana not only to ingest and process information, but also to understand where to send information and what to do with it.
“I think of Tana as a catalog of tools,” he said, estimating that he is now integrated with 50 different tools (such as Zoom), all of which are also building their own functionality of AI. “If all these tools have their own AI agent, how the hell will they be able to collaborate? So basically you are finishing copying and hitting and having disparate information that is out of synchronization everywhere. That is the central problem we are trying to solve. “
Inevitably there will be several companies, including existing leaders in notes and productivity spaces such as the notion, which may also be considering how to build an assistant with AI to wrap everything we do when we are on a keyboard or screen.
Tana has a way to go before he is in the “simply works” stage. KRIKEN said that, for example, Tana is “probably better for technology expert professionals” who are willing to do some touch -ups so that the product behaves as they wish. “But in the future, we really believe that this is a paradigm shift in the way we work with information. We imagine Tana used by all knowledge workers. “
Investors are convinced that it is worth betting. “I know many productivity companies and I have been in space,” said Sheila Gulati, founder and managing director of Tola Capital, in an interview. “But this is a miraculous experience. I use it to execute our company VC. This is a market that will have real competition and players who wish to win, but this team has a high level of commitment to boost experience. This is a long game, and its vision of productivity is completely different. ”
