An application that helps people and groups in the world of work to simplify the lists of their work-ideally by organizing and performing some of the work for them-has been one of the unresolved goals in business technology. Leans to AI, over battle scars from Google Wave cover, a start -up called Tann He believes he has broken the code on how to get it.
Tana is now emerging from Stealth, announcing $ 25 million for the first time in funding from an interesting list of supporters to start.
Tana is essentially part of the automated list manufacturer and the Taker Note, Part Application Enabler and the organizer. He may hear conversations (for example above the zoom) or the vocal notes directed to Tana herself, transcribe and convert them into action elements. It then works on it, depending on what the user can incorporate it to create lists, computer sheets, website updates and much more.
It also has a feature called “Supertag”, which the company describes as designed to objective programming that “converts unspecified into structured information in seconds”.
The idea of ​​Tana is that it will improve over time, as it gets more data and as its team creates future repetitions.
“We are creating a knowledge graph,” Managing Director Tarjei Vassbotn said in an interview. Tana is an important rapid river in Norway and Vassbotn said the start named himself after that. “Tana is a river of information,” he said.
It aims both for individuals and groups, Tana aims to help create and then work with the data and the next action data created by its users.
“Everything you do, whether you talk to your phone or by meeting or writing your own notes. All organized and automatically connected together so that AI can work,” Vassbotn said.
There is already some momentum behind the start. At the back of a popular indoor beta and word of mouth, Tana claims to have already managed to get 160,000 users on a waiting list, with a high concentration from large businesses. (The waiting list will begin to open today.)
Tana says that about 30,000 people used and examined the closed beta for nine months and gathered 24,000 users in a Tana Slack community.
The other momentum is behind the scenes. Tana is based in Palo Alto and has a Development and Business Office in Norway, with three Norwegian co -founders. Vassbotn and Grim Iversen (CPO) are formerly Googlers, and Ivensen was one of the highest people who build Google Wave, who also aims to solve the problem of obligations and cooperation. They were united by Coo Olav Kriken, who has built a series of digital companies in Norway.
The three are well connected and have raised $ 25 million in two installments. Tola Capital, a VC company that focuses on AI’s AI software, drives the latest $ 14 million AI series in valuation after $ 100 million, with the participation of Lightspeed Venture, Northzone, Alliance VC and Partners Firstminute Capital.
The $ 11 million seed round saw investments from La Famiglia (now part of General Catalyst), co -founder Google Maps Lars Rasmussen, co -founder Dropbobobox Arash Ferdowsi, Founder of the Modern Siqi Chen and Founder of Datadog Olivier Pomel, Two dozen others.
Angels’ investors are all remarkable for their own efforts to build better productivity tools.
Rasmussen, in particular, is a software myth. On Google he founded and ran the Google maps, which gave him the green light to test his hand in business productivity with the finished Google wave.
Rasmussen then moved to Facebook to work to search and build and start the social network’s effort to try to fix this problem with another application called Now Defunct called Workplace. For recent years, he has been working for the newly established businesses and the Angel investment. In an interview, he said that IVtern was one of the selected talented people who met with the years who would be willing to support “almost no matter what”.
‘Grim really put some [the Tana] Ideas 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 in business software, but no one has worked hard enough as we hoped. Even the so -called Slack’s Killer has, in the end, converted the OVAtuffed Inbox into a inflatable load different notifications.
The founders of Tana are part of this complex story. Now, their belief is that the cycle can eventually be completed by careful application of AI.
This was not a quick process, nor where they were considered to work in a vacuum without other competitors. The company first met in 2020 and spent time trying to understand the best approach to create what he envisioned.
“We started building our own models for everything,” Vassbotn said. “But when GPT-3 came out, we realized that this was a match between many players.” Many players trying to build productivity tools said, and those who build large linguistic models.
The company quickly revolved: “To make sure we could support any model in the universe, basically, and put all our efforts on it,” Vassbotn continued. “This sounds easy, but it is very difficult when dealing with a knowledge graph where things have to be accurate.” Therefore, the long period of almost four years between the establishment and the start of the closed beta.
Currently, he said, Tana is mainly working with Openai to authorize the physical processing of language, “but we also use the anthropogenic and Grok and have some local models running on your computer based on open source models.”
AI is used in Tana not only for swallowing and processing information, but also to understand where to send information and what to do with it.
“I think of Tana as a tool list,” he said, estimating that it is now incorporated with 50 different tools (such as zoom), which also build their own AI functionality. “If all of these tools have their own AI agent, how will they be able to work together? So, basically you just end up copying and pasteing and having different information that is out of sync everywhere. This is the kind of basic problem that We try to solve. “
There will be inevitably several companies, including existing leaders in notes and productivity such as the concept, who can also consider how to build an AI assistant to wrap everything we do when we are a keyboard or screen.
Tana has ways to go before it is in the “It Just Works” stage. Kriken said, for example, Tana is “probably better for technology professionals” who are willing to do a little tinkering to get the product to behave how they want it. “But below the line, we really believe that this is a shift of the example to the way we work with information. We think Tana used by all knowledge workers.”
Investors are convinced that it is worth a bet. “I know many productivity companies and I am in the field,” Sheila Gulati, founder and chief executive of Tola Capital, said in an interview. “But this is a miraculous experience. I use it to run VC. 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 lead the experience. This is a long their play and their vision for productivity is completely different.
