An app that helps people and teams in the working world simplify their to-do lists — ideally by organising and doing some of the work for them — has remained one of the unsolved goals in business technology. Leaning into AI, on top of battle scars from once building Google Wave, a startup called Tana believes it’s cracked the code on how to reach it.
Today, Tana is emerging from stealth, announcing $25 million in funding from an interesting list of backers to get started.
At its most basic, Tana is part automated-list builder and note taker, part application enabler, and part organiser. It can listen to conversations (for example over Zoom) or voice memos directed to Tana itself, transcribing them and turns them into action items. It then starts to work on that, depending on what you the user might have integrated with it for the purpose, to create lists, spreadsheets, web page updates and more.
It also has a feature it calls “Supertag,” which it describes as modelled on Object-oriented programming that “transforms unstructured to structured information in seconds.”
Tana’s ambitious idea is that it will improve over time, as it takes on more data, and as its team builds future iterations of the platform.
“We are building out a knowledge graph,” said CEO Tarjei Vassbotn in an interview. Tana is a major fast-flowing river in Norway and Vassbotn said that the startup named itself after it. “Tana is a river of information,” he said.
Aimed at both individuals as well as teams of users — beta users included engineering, design, content creation, product and management teams — the idea is that Tana helps create and then work with the data and subsequent action items that its users are generating over the course of a normal day.
“Everything that you do, whether it’s talking to your phone or having a meeting or writing your own notes, it all is automatically organized and connected together so that our AI can work.”
Out of the gates, there is already some momentum behind the startup. On the back of a popular closed beta and word of mouth, Tana claims that it has already managed to pick up 160,000 users on a waitlist, with a heavy concentration from large enterprises. (That list will start to open today.)
Tana says that it’s had some 30,000 people using and testing its closed beta, which it launched about nine months ago; and it’s amassed 24,000 users on a Tana Slack community — Slack, coincidentally, being another effort to make working more efficient.
The other momentum is behind the scenes. Tana is headquartered in Palo Alto and has a development and operations office in Norway, with three Norwegian co-founders. Vassbotn and Grim Iversen (CPO) are ex-Googlers. Significantly, Iversen had been one of the senior people building Google Wave, another of the efforts to solve the to-do and collaboration problem. They are joined by a third co-founder, COO Olav Kriken, who has built a string of digital companies in the country.
The three are well-connected and have raised $25 million in two tranches. In the most recent Series A for $14 million, Tola Capital, a VC that focuses on AI-powered enterprise software, is leading with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northzone, Alliance VC, and firstminute capital.
The seed round of $11 million had backing from La Famiglia (now part of General Catalyst), Lars Rasmussen, co-founder of Dropbox Arash Ferdowsi, Runway founder Siqi Chen, and Datadog founder Olivier Pomel among nearly two dozen others.
The angels are all notable for their own efforts to build better productivity tools, some multiple times.
Rasmussen in particular is a software legend. At Google he founded and ran Google Maps, which gave him the green light to then try his hand at enterprise productivity, with the ultimately ill-fated Google Wave.
Rasmussen then moved to Facebook to work on search and build and launch the social network’s own effort to try to fix this problem, another now-defunct app called Workplace. For the last several years, he’s been working on startups and angel investing. In an interview, he said that Iversen was one of a select handful of talented people he’s met over the years that he would be willing to back, “pretty much no matter what.”
“Grim actually pitched some of [the Tana] ideas for Google Wave, but we never had time to to build them,” Rasmussen said.
The fact is that many talented builders have tried to conquer efficiency/productivity conundrum in business software, yet all of them have not quite worked as hoped. Even Slack’s so-called email killer has, in the end, turned the overstuffed inbox into a bloated burden of a different, notification kind.
Tana’s founders are part of that complicated history. Now, their belief is that the circle can finally by completed through careful application of AI.
That’s not been a quick process, nor one where they presumed to be working in a vacuum with no other competitors. The company first came together in 2020 and spent time trying to figure out the best approach to create what it envisioned.
“We started out building our own models for everything,” Vassbotn said. “But when GPT3 came out, we realized that this is going to be a race among many players.” Many players trying to build productivity, he said, but also those building Large Language Models.
The company quickly pivoted, “to make sure that we could support any model in the universe, basically, and put all of our efforts into that,” Vassbotn continued. “That sounds easy, but it’s pretty hard when you’re dealing with a knowledge graph, where things needs to be precise.” Hence the long period of nearly four years between being founded and launching the closed beta.
Currently, he said, Tana is partnering primarily with OpenAI to power its natural language processing, “but we also use Anthropic and Grok, and we have some local models running on your computer based off of open source models.”
AI is used at Tana not just to ingest and process information but also to understand where to send information, what to do with it.
“I think of Tana as a tool catalog,” he said, estimating that it’s now integrating with around 50 different tools (such as Zoom), all of which themselves are also building their own AI functionality to make work for users a little easier. “If all of those tools have their own AI agent, how on earth are they going to be able to collaborate? So you’re basically just ending up copying and pasting and having disparate information that is out of sync everywhere. And that is sort of the core problem that we’re trying to solve.”
There are inevitably going to be a number of companies, including existing leaders in the note-taking and productivity spaces like Notion, also bullish on AI, may well also be considering how to build an AI-powered assistant to wrap around everything we do when we’re at a keyboard or a screen.
And Tana has a ways to go before it’s at the “it just works” stage. Kriken, for example, that today, Tana is “probably best for tech savvy professionals” who are willing to do a little tinkering to get the product to behave how they want it. “But down the line, we really believe that this is a paradigm shift in how we work with information. We envision Tana used by all knowledge workers.”
Investors are convinced it’s worth a bet. “I meet a lot of productivity companies and have been in the space,” Sheila Gulati, founder and managing director of Tola Capital said in an interview. “But this is a miraculous experience. I use it to run our VC firm. This is a market that will have real competition and players who want to win but the this team has a high level of commitment to drive the experience. This is a long game, and their vision of productivity is completely different.”