Tana: $25 Million Closed For Human-AI Collaboration Platform

By Amit Chowdhry • Feb 3, 2025

Tana, an all-in-one workspace that naturally integrates AI into everyday work, announced a $14 million Series A round led by Tola Capital, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northzone, Alliance VC, and firstminute capital. This funding round brought the total to $25 million.

This funding round will further the company’s goal of transforming how humans, teams, and computers work together, building AI agents and voice-powered workflows to redefine productivity for worldwide savvy professionals.

During its stealth phase, Tana built a waitlist of over 160,000 users—including representation from over 80% of Fortune 500 companies. The company is launching its platform, promising to transform how we approach knowledge work radically. Over 30,000 people have tested the platform, and over 24,000 “Tanarians” contribute to their active Slack community.

Tana was created by Tarjei Vassbotn, Olav Kriken, and Grim Iversen—united in their obsession with productivity problems.

Tarjei and Olav are serial entrepreneurs. Tarjei is a former Google employee with deep product and AI experience, and Olav is one of the leading growth figures in the Nordics. Grim has technical expertise regarding information modeling and has worked on productivity systems for the past 25 years, such as a central role in developing Google Wave. As engineers and tech visionaries, they also 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.

Tana’s approach combines three novel technologies to eradicate the work about work and unlock the potential of AI and voice-based workflows. 1.) Tana is a knowledge graph with connections that mimic the human brain to distribute and scale knowledge effectively. 2.) Tana is built to be proactive and has many feeds and mechanisms that resurface, process, and connect information so you automatically get it where you need it. 3.) The most loved feature is the Supertag. Building on concepts from object-oriented programming, it transforms unstructured information into 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.

Lars Rasmussen (Founder of Google Maps and the Google Wave CEO) was one of the company’s first backers, believing this is a superior approach to knowledge management and AI. And other notable angels who invested in the company are Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox co-founder), Siqi Chen (Runway founder), Olivier Pomel (Datadog founder), and Holly Branson (Virgin).

KEY QUOTES:

“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.” 

  • 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 revolutionize knowledge work for high-speed organizations. They’ve built one of the most impressive AI agents I’ve ever seen and infused it into every part of the product.”

  • 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. 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.”

  • Tarjei Vassbotn

“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 organization for the inevitable: The increasing rate of change, the need for collaboration, and the information flow that comes with the advent of AI. The age of personal effectiveness is here, and Tana is front and center.”

  • Andre Foeken, CTO Nedap