On Sana’s $34M Series B, to continue reimagining the way organizations learn
Today, we are happy to share that Sana, the leading AI-powered learning platform, announced the close of its $34M Series B led by Menlo Ventures. After leading the Series A in 2020, we also joined the round alongside some operator and founder friends.
“By changing the way the world learns, we change the world”
In today’s fast-paced and constantly changing business environment, organizations must continuously learn and adapt in order to remain competitive. Learning is the foundation of progress, and the more people we can empower through world-class learning, the more game-changing innovation we’ll see. Since the beginning of EQT Ventures, we’ve been on the lookout for highly innovative edtech companies, but we didn’t meet “the one”, until we met Sana.
Let’s go back to the beginning (well, not all the way back, since that would mean 2010 when Joel interned with Ted at his design agency, Great Works). In 2020, Ted, Henrik and I started a deep-dive into corporate learning. We spent countless hours talking to HR & L&D departments, as well as other stakeholders engaging in learning. We quickly learned that:
- “HR has many doors”- referring to the stack of 5+ tools to cover the need of corporate knowledge management and learning.
- The learning experience is poor, “one-size-fits all”, and thus inefficient, while L&D teams are being modernized and want to see more modern solutions.
- Meanwhile, in various parts of the organizations, managers need help with courses for onboarding, upskilling or reskilling. Best case, they can work with central HR and internal or external course developers to get them into the learning system. But in many cases, they are forced to invent their own solutions, involving various tools.
”The biggest opportunities for startups are markets where the incumbent still has engineered major friction that’s holding back the true scale of the market. Devise a better solution and you also unlock a much larger market”, Aaron Levie, CEO, Box
Imagine our excitement when we discovered the vision and early product of Sana: consumer grade, focusing on the authoring experience to turn everyone into learning creators while leveraging artificial intelligence to make the experience seamless, personal and smart.
Fast forward 2 years, and Sana has built an end-to-end platform learning platform (yes, you no longer need an LMS, LXP, etc, but if you want to keep them Sana works with them too) that decreases onboarding time, improves sales efficiency, and grows and retains top talent. The numbers speak for themselves, with a 7x year-over-year growth in ARR, Sana has become the home for learning for pioneers ranging from Svea Solar to Klarna, Kry and Merck.
When you get to know Joel (Founder and the CEO of Sana), you quickly realize that this is just the beginning of what team Sana has set out to achieve. Joel’s visionary leadership and rare combination of technical skills and exceptional ambition, have enabled him to assemble a world-class team from some of the foremost tech companies.
In true Sana spirit, they always have “one more thing” to amaze us with in board meetings and catch-ups.
Learning being the foundation of human progress, we believe Sana will play an important role in reimagining learning as we know it. The new funding will be used to extend Sana’s product development and expand its team across Stockholm, London, and New York. If you think it sounds exciting, check out careers at Sana.
We can’t wait to continue to be part of Sana’s journey alongside JP Sanday from Menlo and amazing people like Anna Nordell Westling, Mattias Miksche, Sophia Bendz, Fredrik Jung Abbou, Erik Engellau, John Lindfors, Sven Hagströmer and Fredrik Strömsten. And thanks again Sana, for even making the compliance courses fun at EQT.
