In a world where productivity tools are plentiful but fragmented, one company is aiming to redefine how we work. Tana, an all-in-one workspace that integrates AI into everyday work, has secured $14 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Tola Capital, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northzone, Alliance VC, and firstminute capital. This round brings the company’s total funding to $25 million.
Tana has received backing from a slew of angel investors, including Lars Rasmussen, the founder of Google Maps and the Google Wave CEO. Being one of its first backers, he believed it is a superior approach to knowledge management and AI. Other notable angels who put their faith in the company are Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox co-founder), Siqi Chen (Runway founder), Olivier Pomel (Datadog founder), and Holly Branson (Virgin).
The funding will further the company’s goal to reinvent how humans, teams, and computers work together, building AI agents and voice-powered workflows to redefine productivity for savvy professionals worldwide.
Who is behind Tana?
Tana was founded by Tarjei Vassbotn, Olav Kriken, and Grim Iversen in Norway in 2020 and is headquartered in the US. They wanted to find a solution to the problems facing productivity. Serial entrepreneur Tarjei is an ex-Googler with deep product and AI experience and Olav is one of the leading growth figures coming out of the Nordics. Grim has deep technical expertise regarding information modelling and has worked on productivity systems for the past 25 years, including a central role in developing Google Wave.
As engineers and tech visionaries, they knew there was a better way to work with information than the fragmented paradigm of docs, spreadsheets, slide decks, and emails. With AI, they saw a path to solve it.
Unlocks human-AI collaboration
The company combines three novel technologies to eradicate the work about work and unlock the potential of AI and voice-based workflows. Firstly, Tana is a knowledge graph with connections that mimic the human brain to effectively distribute and scale knowledge. Secondly, Tana is built to be proactive. It has a multitude of feeds and mechanisms that resurface, process, and connect information, so you automatically get it where you need it. Finally, the most loved feature is the Supertag.
Building on concepts from object-oriented programming, it transforms unstructured to structured information in seconds. This means you can effortlessly whip up AI workflows, streamline instructions for the AI agents, and instantly transform raw notes and voice recordings into ready-to-use output.
During its stealth phase, Tana built a waitlist of more than 160,000 users, including representation from over 80% of Fortune 500 companies. Now, the company is launching its platform, promising to radically transform how we approach knowledge work. Over 30,000 people have tested the platform, and more than 24,000 “Tanarians” contribute to their active Slack community.
“This team’s obsession with transforming productivity for our AI-native world sets them apart. They deeply understand that the future of work will be dynamic and personalized, and their voice-first product represents a bold vision for reshaping how teams collaborate globally,” said Sheila Gulati, founder and managing director of Tola Capital.
“I’ve loved being an early adopter of Tana and I’m a believer in the team’s incredible vision to revolutionise knowledge work for high-speed organisations. They’ve built one of the most impressive AI agents I’ve ever seen and infused it into every part of the product,” said Nnamdi Iregbulem, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
“The computer was supposed to be the bicycle for the mind. Instead, we got a hamster wheel resulting in loads of work about work,” said Vassbotn. “With AI we can solve this, but only if we approach knowledge work in a fundamentally different way. Plugging AI into our current fragmented ecosystem of tools will create an even bigger mess.”
“Tana is like having a superpower at work. The right information at the right time. It is also the best tool we currently have to prepare our organisation for the inevitable: The increasing rate of change, the need for collaboration, and the information flow that comes with the advent of AI,” said Andre Foeken, CTO Nedap. “The age of personal effectiveness is here, and Tana is front and center.”
