SAN FRANCISCO — Nova Intelligence has secured $40 million in funding across seed and Series A to build the frontier AI platform for SAP — the system of record for the world’s largest enterprises. The Series A was led by Chemistry, with participation from Accel, Conviction, and SAP.iO. The seed was led by Accel, with participation from Conviction and SAP.iO.
SAP is the heart of the enterprise. 92% of the Global 2000 rely on SAP to run their most important business processes — finance, supply chain, manufacturing, logistics, sales, and more. These environments are deeply customized to fit each company’s unique business needs, which is why every dollar spent on SAP software drives roughly seven dollars in services. With a mandatory migration to SAP’s next-generation platform by 2030 — a project costing some companies over a billion dollars — the pressure on SAP teams has never been greater. Nova helps SAP teams work faster, spend less, and reduce risk through this migration and beyond, across the full SAP lifecycle from design and development to testing and day-to-day operations.
Nova is focused on building the most powerful and safest AI agent for SAP teams. Nova helps everyone on the SAP team, from ABAP developers to functional analysts, work dramatically faster across functional design, fit-to-standard analysis, modernization, coding, documentation, production issue resolution, and more. The platform is highly customizable, adapting to each organization’s unique guidelines, workflows, and processes. As teams use Nova, institutional knowledge accumulates inside the platform rather than living in the heads of a few senior people or external consultants.
Nova is battle-tested in production across some of the most complex SAP environments in the world — including companies that have run SAP for decades at massive scale.
Festo, a German automation leader and one of the first 30 SAP customers in history, runs SAP across more than 15,000 users in 61 countries. Teams using Nova report more than 5x productivity gains across their daily work. Documentation that once took three months now takes a single day, and projects that were previously out of scope are now viable.
“How we answer every one of the big three questions about our SAP program — how long will it take, how much will it cost, and how big is the risk — has improved significantly since adding Nova to our teams. Our team estimates they are more than 5x more productive on average across all tasks. That level of capacity increase completely changes the game for our organization.” Jörn Weigle, CIO of Festo.
“Nova Intelligence addresses the two requirements that matter most to us: operating truly Clean-Core-compliant systems and achieving the development performance our SAP landscape demands. The results have been outstanding,” Carsten Engelbrecht, CIO of KION Group.
Nova brings together a rare combination of world-class AI research, engineering, and deep SAP expertise. CEO and co-founder Emma Qian was previously at Google DeepMind and Meta AI Research. CTO and co-founder Sam Yang founded Bloom, which grew to over 2 million users. Chief Scientist and co-founder Prof. Dr. Alexander Zeier is co-inventor of SAP HANA and former CTO of Accenture’s SAP Business Group, where he oversaw some of the largest and most complex SAP transformations in the world. They are joined by Chief Customer Officer Justin Kershaw, former CIO of Cargill, who spent decades running one of the world’s largest SAP deployments. He joined Nova because he’s lived this problem from the customer’s seat, and recognized Nova as the answer he spent decades waiting for.
“Nova is tackling one of the largest and most important opportunities in enterprise software. The level of love we heard from their customers was the strongest signal we could ask for. We’re thrilled to lead the Series A and work alongside the Nova team.” Kristina Shen, Managing Partner and Co-founder at Chemistry.
Accel, which led Nova’s seed round, doubled down in the Series A.
“Nova has a rare combination of deep technical expertise and real customer obsession. It was a privilege to lead the seed round, and we are excited to deepen our partnership as they define and lead a new category at the intersection of frontier AI and the most complex enterprise systems in the world.” Ivan Zhou, Accel.
Nova says it is hiring across engineering, sales, and marketing.
