An app that helps people and teams in the work world simplify their lists to do-in an ideal way by organizing and doing some of the work to remain one of the unresolved goals in business technology. Bowing to him, at the top of the battle wounds from once building Google Wave, a startup named Tana believes the code is cracked on how to reach it.
Today, Tana is stealing, announcing $ 25 million in funds from an interesting list of supporters to start.
In the most fundamental one, Tana is part of the automated list and the note holder, the application trainer and the organizer of the part. It can hear conversations (for example over enlargement) or sound memorandums directed at our own, transcribing them and turns them into action items. Then he starts working on this, depending on what you the user may have integrated with her for the purpose, to create lists, spreadsheets, web updates and more.
It also has a feature that it calls “Supetrag”, which it describes as modeled on object -oriented programming that “transforms without structured information in seconds”.
Our ambitious idea is that it will improve over time, as it receives more data, and while its team builds future platform repetitions.
“We are building a graph of knowledge,” Ceo Terjai Vassbotn said in an interview. Tana is a big river that flows rapidly in Norway and Vassbotn said the beginning named itself after it. “Tana is a stream of information,” he said.
Target for both individuals and user teams – Beta users included engineering, design, content creation, product teams and management – the idea is to help create and then work with subsequent data and items the action its users are generating over the course of a normal day.
“Everything you do, whether you are talking on your phone or having an appointment or writing your notes, everything is automatically organized and connected together so that our one can work.”
From the gates, there is already a momentous moment after starting. On the back of a popular beta and word of the mouth, Tana claims she has already managed to get 160,000 users in a waiting list, with a heavy concentration from large enterprises. (This list will start to open today.)
Tana says she had about 30,000 people using and testing her closed beta, which she started about nine months ago; And has accumulated 24,000 users in a Tana Slack community – clumsy, by chance, being another attempt to make the job more efficient.
The next moment is behind the scenes. Tana is based in Palo Alto and has a development and operation office in Norway, with three Norwegian co -founders. Vassbotn and Make Iversen (CPO) are former Googlers. Significantly, Iversen had been one of the elderly built by Google Wave, another of the efforts to solve the problem of task and cooperation. They are joined by a third co -founder, Coo Olav Kriken, who has built a number of digital enterprises in the country.
All three are well connected and raised $ 25 million in two installments. In the latest series A for $ 14 million, Tola Capital, a QV focusing on the company’s software with him, is leading participation by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northzone, Alliance VC, and Firstminute Capital.
The $ 11 million seed round had support from La Famiglia (now part of General Catalyst), Lars Rasmussen, co -founder of Dropbox Arash Ferdowsi, the founder of the Siqi Chen, and the founder of Datadog Olivier Pomel among nearly two others.
Angels are all visible for their efforts to build better productivity tools, several times.
Rasmussen in particular is a software legend. On Google he founded and ran Google Maps, who gave him the green light to try his hand in the productivity of the enterprise, with Google Wave finally fortunate.
Rasmussen then moved to Facebook to work in search and build and start the social network effort itself to try to fix this problem, another now intact application called WorkPlace. For the last few years, he has been working at Startup and Angel investing. In an interview, he said Iversen was one of the small part of the talented people he has met over the years that he would be ready to return, “pretty much no matter what”.
“Grim actually raised some of the ideas for Google Wave, but we’ve never had time to build them,” Rasmussen said.
The fact is that many talented builders have tried to conquer the efficiency/productivity of conversion to the business software, however all of them have not worked as much as hoping. Even the so -called Slack mail killer, after all, has turned the excess box into a swollen load of another kind, notification.
Our founders are part of that complex story. Now, their belief is that the circle can finally end through the careful application of it.
This was not a quick process, not even the one where they assumed they were working in a vacuum without another competition. The company first gathered in 2020 and spent time trying to understand the best approach to creating what it envisioned.
“We started building our models for everything,” Vassbotn said. “But when GPT3 came out. We realized that this will be a race among many players.” Many players who try to build productivity, he said, but also those who build large language models.
The company quickly headed, “to make sure we can support any model in the universe, essentially, and make all our efforts in this,” Vassbotn continued. “It sounds easy, but it’s very difficult when dealing with a graph of knowledge where things have to be correct.” Therefore the long period of nearly four years between the establishment and the launch of the beta closed.
Currently, he said, Tana is partnership mainly with Openai to strengthen its natural language processing, “but we also use anthropic and Grok, and we have some local models that work on your computer based on open source models.”
It is used in Tana not only to devour and process the information, but also to understand where you can send information, what to do with it.
“I think of Tana as a catalog of tools,” he said, assessing that he is now integrating with about 50 different tools (such as magnification), all themselves are building their functionality to do work for users slightly easier. “If all those tools have their own agent, as on Earth will be able to cooperate? So you are basically just finishing copying and climbing and you have different information that is out of synchronization anywhere. And this is one The essential problem we are trying to solve. “
There will inevitably have a number of enterprises, including existing leaders in taking and productivity as a notion, also bullies in it, can also consider how to build an energy assistant to complete everything we do when we do when we do when we do When we do when we do we are on a keyboard or on a screen.
And Tana has a way to go before it is in the “simply work” phase. Criken, for example, that today, Tana is “probably the best for frugal technology professionals” who are willing to do a little more to get the product to do how they want it. “But below the line, we really believe that this is a paradigm shift in the way we work with information. We anticipate tana used by all knowledge workers.”
Investors are convinced that it is worth a bet. “I meet many productivity companies and have been in space,” said Sheila Gularati, founder and director of Tola Capital in an interview. “But this is a wonderful experience. I use it to execute our VC firm. 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 encourage The experience is a long game, and their vision for productivity is completely different. ”
