Joel Hellermark founded Swedish company Sana AI when he was only 19. Now the AI startup has raised $55 million at a $500 million valuation.

Swedish AI startup Sana was swamped last January. The Stockholm-based team was growing but its team was struggling to field calls and meetings with corporates like German pharma group Merck, trading app Robinhood and Swedish home-appliance maker Electrolux for its AI tools that make sense of sprawling internal databases and tools like Salesforce. These were lucrative accounts but work for large customers was time-consuming and making it hard to find new ones. That’s when Sana’s founder Joel Hellermark flipped the script.

Hellermark’s idea was to create a free version of the AI agent that can draft emails, take meeting minutes and complete simple forms that it was selling to enterprise clients. Six months after launching this free tier around 100,000 new workplaces have signed up. Teams with more than five members pay $30 per user per month. Now Sana has raised $55 million........

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