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.
Tana is now emerging from stealth, announcing $25 million in funding from an interesting list of backers to get started.
Tana is essentially part automated-list builder and note taker, part application enabler, and part organizer. It can listen to conversations (for example over Zoom) or voice memos directed to Tana itself, transcribe them and turn them into action items. It then works on that, depending on what the user might have integrated it with, to create lists, spreadsheets, web page updates and more.
It also has a feature it calls “Supertag,” which the company describes as modelled on object-oriented programming that “transforms unstructured to structured information in seconds.”
Tana’s idea is that it will improve over time as it takes on more data and as its team builds future iterations.
“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, Tana aims to help create and then work with the data and subsequent action items that its users generate.
“Everything that you do, whether it’s talking to your phone or having a meeting or writing your own notes, it is all automatically organized and connected together so that our AI can work,” Vassbotn said.
There is already some momentum behind the startup. On the back of a popular closed beta and word of mouth, Tana claims it has already managed to pick up 160,000 users on a waitlist, with a heavy concentration from large enterprises. (The waitlist will start to open today.)
Tana says some 30,000 people used and tested its closed beta over nine months, and it’s amassed 24,000 users on a Tana Slack community.
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, and significantly, Iversen was one of the senior people building Google Wave, which also aimed to solve the to-do and collaboration problem. They are joined by COO Olav Kriken, who has built a string of digital companies in Norway.
The three are well-connected and have raised $25 million in two tranches. Tola Capital, a VC firm that focuses on AI-powered enterprise software, is leading the most recent $14 million Series A, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northzone, Alliance VC, and firstminute capital.
The seed round of $11 million saw investment from La Famiglia (now part of General Catalyst), Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, Runway founder Siqi Chen, and Datadog founder Olivier Pomel, among nearly two dozen others.
The angel investors are all notable 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 gave him the green light to 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 with 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 build them,” Rasmussen said.
The fact is that many talented builders have tried to conquer the efficiency/productivity conundrum in business software, yet none have 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 kind of notifications.
Tana’s founders are part of that complicated history. Now, their belief is that the circle can finally be completed with 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 GPT-3 came out, we realized that this is going to be a race among many players.” Many players that are trying to build productivity tools, 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 need 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 and what to do with it.
“I think of Tana as a tool catalog,” he said, estimating that it now integrates with 50 different tools (such as Zoom), all of which are also building their own AI functionality. “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. That is sort of the core problem 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, who 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 example, 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 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.”
