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An app that helps people and team in the work world simplify their to - do inclination — ideally by form and doing some of the oeuvre for them — has remained one of the unsolved goal in business technology . Leaning into AI , on top ofbattle scarsfrom once building Google Wave , a inauguration calledTanabelieves it ’s cracked the code on how to reach it .
Tana is now egress from stealth , announcing for the first clock time $ 25 million in funding from an interesting lean of backers to get begin .
Tana is fundamentally part automated - list detergent builder and eminence taker , part covering enabler , and part organizer . It can listen to conversations ( for example over Zoom ) or voice memos aim to Tana itself , transliterate them and turn them into action items . It then bring on that , depending on what the drug user might have integrate it with , to create leaning , spreadsheets , entanglement page update and more .
It also has a feature it shout out “ Supertag , ” which the company describes as mould on object - orient programming that “ transforms unstructured to structured information in seconds . ”
Tana ’s mind is that it will improve over sentence as it hire on more data and as its team builds next iterations .
“ We are building out a knowledge graph , ” said CEO Tarjei Vassbotn in an audience . Tana is a major fast - flow river in Norway , and Vassbotn state that the startup named itself after it . “ Tana is a river of info , ” he said .
Aimed at both individual as well as team , Tana aims to facilitate create and then work with the data point and subsequent action items that its user give .
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“ Everything that you do , whether it ’s talking to your sound or have a meeting or compose your own Federal Reserve note , it is all mechanically devise and tie in together so that our AI can work , ” Vassbotn said .
There is already some impulse behind the inauguration . On the back of a pop closed beta and give-and-take of sass , Tana claim it has already manage to pick up 160,000 exploiter on a waitlist , with a leaden concentration from large endeavor . ( The waitlist will start to open up today . )
Tana say some 30,000 the great unwashed used and tested its closed beta over nine months , and it ’s amassed 24,000 substance abuser on a Tana Slack residential area .
The other impulse is behind the scenes . Tana is headquartered in Palo Alto and has a growing and operations office in Norway , with three Norwegian Colorado - founder . Vassbotn and Grim Iversen ( CPO ) are ex-husband - Googlers , and importantly , Iversen was one of the senior citizenry ramp up Google Wave , which also aimed to puzzle out the to - do and quislingism problem . They are bring together by COO Olav Kriken , who has build a string of digital companies in Norway .
The three are well - connected and have raise $ 25 million in two tranche . Tola Capital , a VC firm that focuses on AI - power enterprise software , is leading the most recent $ 14 million Series A at a $ 100 million post - money valuation , with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners , Northzone , Alliance VC , and firstminute working capital .
The semen round of $ 11 million saw investment from La Famiglia ( now part of General Catalyst ) , Google Maps co - founder Lars Rasmussen , Dropbox carbon monoxide - founder Arash Ferdowsi , Runway founder Siqi Chen , and Datadog founding father Olivier Pomel , among nearly two dozen others .
The angel investors are all illustrious for their own efforts to build better productivity tools .
Rasmussen , in particular , is a software legend . At Google he founded and ran Google Maps , which move over him the green ignitor to try his hand at enterprise productivity with theultimately poorly - fated Google Wave .
Rasmussen then moved to Facebook to act upon on search , andbuild and launchthe social web ’s own exploit to assay to fix this problem with anothernow - defunct appcalled Workplace . For the last several age , he ’s been working on startups and saint investing . In an interview , he said that Iversen was one of a prize handful of talented people he ’s meet over the years that he would be unforced to back “ pretty much no matter what . ”
“ Grim really pitch some of [ the Tana ] ideas for Google Wave , but we never had metre to build them , ” Rasmussen said .
The fact is that many talented builders have tried to conquer the efficiency / productiveness enigma in business software program , yet none have quite work as hoped . Even Slack’sso - send for email cause of death has , in the end , turned the overstuffed inbox into abloated burdenof a different kind of notification .
Tana ’s founder are part of that complicated history . Now , their feeling is that the circle can finally be fill in with careful software of AI .
That ’s not been a agile process , nor one where they presume to be working in a vacuum with no other contender . The company first came together in 2020 and spend time assay to project out the best approach to create what it envisioned .
“ We start out building our own fashion model for everything , ” Vassbotn said . “ But when GPT-3 came out , we realized that this is going to be a subspecies among many musician . ” Many player that are endeavor to work up productivity tools , he said , but also those building large linguistic communication models .
The party cursorily pivoted , “ to make certain that we could endure any model in the universe , essentially , and put all of our exploit into that , ” Vassbotn stay . “ That fathom easy , but it ’s reasonably hard when you ’re deal with a cognition graphical record , where thing take to be precise . ” Hence the long period of nearly four eld between being constitute and found the unopen beta .
presently , he said , Tana is partnering primarily with OpenAI to power its natural language processing , “ but we also utilize Anthropic and Grok , and we have some local simulation run on your computer based off of open source models . ”
AI is used at Tana not just to ingest and outgrowth information but also to understand where to send out information and what to do with it .
“ I conceive of Tana as a tool catalog , ” he say , reckon that it now integrate with 50 dissimilar tools ( such as Zoom ) , all of which are alsobuilding their ownAI functionality . “ If all of those instrument have their own AI factor , how on earthly concern are they going to be able to join forces ? So you ’re essentially just ending up copying and pasting and having disparate data that is out of sync everywhere . That is sort of the core problem we ’re attempt to lick . ”
There are inevitably going to be a number of companies , let in live leader in the note - taking and productiveness spaces like Notion , that may 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 .
Tana has a ways to go before it ’s at the “ it just works ” stage . Kriken said that , for deterrent example , Tana is “ probably best for tech savvy professional ” who are uncoerced to do a little tinkering to get the merchandise to bear how they want it . “ But down the line , we really think that this is a paradigm shift in how we process with information . We visualize Tana used by all cognition workers . ”
Investors are convinced it ’s worth a stakes . “ I meet a draw of productiveness companies and have been in the space , ” Sheila Gulati , founder and managing film director of Tola Capital , say in an interview . “ But this is a miraculous experience . I employ it to run our VC firm . This is a market that will have literal contender and players who want to pull ahead , but this squad has a high level of allegiance to drive the experience . This is a long game , and their vision of productiveness is completely different . ”
