Sana (Sana Labs)
Last reviewed
Jun 8, 2026
Sources
17 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v1 · 1,501 words
Improve this article
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Suggest edit
CtrlK
Last reviewed
Jun 8, 2026
Sources
17 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v1 · 1,501 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Sana (legally Sana Labs AB, and branded Workday Sana following its acquisition) is a Swedish enterprise AI company that builds an AI-native platform for workplace knowledge and learning. Founded in Stockholm in 2016 by Joel Hellermark, the company is best known for two products: Sana Learn, an AI-powered learning and training platform, and Sana Agents (also marketed as Sana AI), an assistant that searches across a company's applications and knowledge, answers questions, and automates work through AI agents. [1][2] In September 2025, Workday announced a definitive agreement to acquire Sana for approximately $1.1 billion; the transaction closed on November 4, 2025, making it one of the largest acquisitions of a European AI company to date. [3][4]
Sana positions itself as an "agentic knowledge" platform: software that connects to the many tools an organization already uses, indexes the information inside them, and exposes that knowledge through natural-language search, AI assistants, and autonomous agents. The company describes its mission as transforming how people access knowledge and learn at work using AI. [1][5]
The platform connects to applications such as Salesforce, Slack, and Notion, ingesting and organizing data so employees can query it conversationally rather than navigating between systems. Sana has used large language models from OpenAI since before its commercial launch, layering retrieval-augmented generation and its own agent infrastructure on top to ground answers in company-specific data with permissions and guardrails. [5][6] By the time of the Workday acquisition, Sana's products were used by more than one million people across hundreds of organizations. [3]
Joel Hellermark founded Sana in 2016, at age 19, during his final year of high school in Stockholm. [4][7] A self-taught programmer, Hellermark learned to code in C at age 13 and built his first company, a video-recommendation startup, at 16. [7] Sana's earliest incarnation was an education-technology company, applying machine learning to personalize learning at scale, before it broadened into enterprise knowledge management and AI assistants. [7][8] Anna Nordell Westling is also credited as a co-founder of the company. [2]
Hellermark received early recognition as a young technologist. In 2019 he was named by The Guardian among ten people under 35 changing the world for the better, and he has been appointed an AI specialist adviser by the Swedish government. [7] Following the Workday acquisition, he continued to lead the Sana team and the development of Sana's products under the Workday umbrella. [4][9]
Sana's offering centers on two products that share a common AI foundation.
Sana Learn is an AI-native learning management and training platform. It includes content creation tools, automated course generation, personalized tutoring, and learning analytics, allowing organizations to build and deliver employee training that adapts to each learner. [3][10] Sana has cited customer results such as a fintech firm reducing content creation from three weeks to three hours and an electric-vehicle maker reporting a large increase in learning engagement, though these figures are company-reported. [1]
Sana Agents (marketed alongside the broader Sana AI assistant) is an AI-native tool for automating workplace tasks. It includes enterprise search across connected applications, an AI assistant that answers questions and can take notes or run meetings, and a no-code builder for creating custom AI agents. [3][10] These agents are designed to handle multi-step workflows, such as completing requests for proposals or updating Salesforce records from call notes, while respecting access controls and AI guardrails. [6] Hellermark has framed the product direction as a progression in which "the UI for AI will go from assistants, to proactive agents, to becoming invisible." [6]
The competitive landscape for Sana spans enterprise search and assistants on one side, including Glean and Microsoft Copilot, and corporate learning platforms on the other, including Docebo and 360Learning. After the acquisition, Workday itself became both the parent and the platform into which Sana's technology is being integrated.
Before its acquisition, Sana raised roughly $130 million in venture funding across several rounds and reached unicorn status with the Workday deal. [4][11] Its investor base included EQT Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). The table below summarizes the company's primary financing milestones; figures are as reported by the company and contemporaneous press.
| Round | Date | Amount | Lead investor(s) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Series A | 2021 | ~$18M | EQT Ventures | Early enterprise expansion [11] |
| Series B | December 2022 | $34M | Menlo Ventures (with EQT Ventures) | ~$180M post-money valuation [2][12] |
| Series C | October 2024 | $55M | NEA (with Menlo Ventures) | ~$500M valuation; total funding over $130M [11][13] |
| Acquisition | Announced Sept 2025, closed Nov 2025 | ~$1.1B | Workday (acquirer) | All-cash acquisition [3][4] |
Alongside its Series C, Sana acquired CTRL, an Israel-based AI workflow-automation startup backed by LocalGlobe and Earlybird, to accelerate development of its custom-agent infrastructure. [13][14] At the time of the Series C, Sana reported serving roughly 300 enterprise customers, with named clients including Novartis, Merck, and the micromobility company Voi, plus tens of thousands of commercial users. [11]
On September 16, 2025, Workday announced a definitive agreement to acquire Sana for approximately $1.1 billion in cash, unveiling the deal at its Workday Rising 2025 conference. [3][15] Workday initially expected the transaction to close in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2026 (ending January 31, 2026), but it completed the acquisition earlier, on November 4, 2025. [3][4]
(Note: some secondary coverage gave inconsistent closing dates; Workday's own completion announcement dated the close to November 4, 2025.)
Workday, a major provider of human capital management (HCM) and financial management software, framed the acquisition around the idea of making Workday the "new front door for work," an experience in which knowledge, data, action, and learning converge so that employees can start and finish their workday inside a single intelligent interface. [3][9] The combined offering, presented under the Workday Sana banner, pairs Sana's AI-powered search, agents, and learning with Workday's enterprise context and data. Sana Learn and Sana Agents continue as named products while also powering the new integrated Workday experience, which Workday said would begin rolling out in 2026. [9][16]
Executives from both companies positioned the deal as transformational. Gerrit Kazmaier, Workday's president of product and technology, said the combination would deliver "a proactive, personalized, and intelligent experience" for the workplace, while Hellermark said joining Workday would let Sana "drastically accelerate" its vision for how organizations access knowledge. [3][4]
The Sana acquisition is significant on several fronts. At roughly $1.1 billion, it ranks among the largest acquisitions of a European AI startup and was widely described as a milestone for the Swedish technology sector. [17][8] It also illustrates the consolidation underway in enterprise AI, as large software platforms acquire AI-native companies to add agentic capabilities, knowledge retrieval, and conversational interfaces directly into their suites rather than building them from scratch.
Strategically, the deal reflects a broader shift toward "agentic knowledge" platforms that blend enterprise search, AI agents, and corporate learning into a single layer over a company's existing tools, a category in which Sana competed with Glean, Microsoft Copilot, and others. For Workday, integrating Sana is an attempt to move beyond record-keeping HCM software toward an AI-driven interface for daily work. For the European startup ecosystem, the outcome offered a high-profile exit for a founder who started the company as a teenager and grew it into a global enterprise vendor. [7][8]