Sana Labs raises $34m to expand workplace-focused, AI-powered learning platform

Stockholm-based AI-powered learning platform Sana Labs has secured $34 million in a recent funding round. Sana will use the funds to fuel its product development and expand its team across its offices in Stockholm, London, and New York.

Menlo Ventures led the Series B funding, joined by EQT Ventures and 25 angels, operators, and founders, valuing the platform at $180 million post-money. The funding came after Sana managed to grow its annual recurring revenue sevenfold in the previous year.

Sana combines the most advanced knowledge management, enterprise learning search, and e-learning platform features that connect to workplace apps such as Salesforce, Notion, Slack, GitHub, Trello, and Asana.

Sana’s AI ingests and organises data across these apps automatically. It also tracks how information in those apps has changed or expanded. Users can then go to Sana and ask for information in “human” language, just like they would in a search engine. It also uses the data as the foundation for e-learning, onboarding, training, and professional development modules devised by company employees.

The platform was initially designed only as a back-end machine learning engine to organise data. After receiving requests for a front-end, CEO and founder Joel Hellermark said that his team ultimately decided to develop a function that would allow people to seamlessly query the data and use them to create training and learning materials.

In terms of usage, Sana sets itself apart from its counterparts. “Sana is used continuously, which is not typical of an e-learning platform,” Hellermark 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.”

“Sana is used continuously, which is very different from a typical e-learning platform. 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.”

Joel Hellermark, CEO at Sana

Sana also differentiates itself through its AI technology, developed and customised by the company. The CEO said his team had also been employing OpenAI’s models “since before launch”, including GPT.

Hellermark said the company believes that “there will be underlying models from the likes of OpenAI with the opportunity to fine-tune them for specific domains”, adding that presently, the company’s focus is on “user experience on top of this”.