Nova Intelligence Raises $40M to Build the Frontier AI Platform for SAP

Nova Intelligence today announces $40M 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. Ninety-two percent 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.

"We're pleased to incorporate Nova Intelligence's work in the SAP partner ecosystem to help our customers modernize their SAP systems with confidence," said SAP.

Purpose-Built for SAP Teams

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.

For SAP customers working toward the 2030 deadline to migrate to S/4HANA, the process is deeply manual: cataloging decades of customizations, running fit-to-standard analysis to reduce custom code to the minimum necessary, rebuilding what remains in clean, cloud-compliant code, and preparing for audits along the way. Customers are using Nova across this entire arc, collapsing months of this manual work into days and significantly reducing the risk of rebuilding the systems their businesses depend on.

Strong Results for Customers

Nova is battle-tested in production across some of the most complex SAP environments in the world-including companies that have run SAP at massive scale for decades.

Festo, a German automation leader and one of the first 30 SAP customers, 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," said Jörn Weigle, CIO of Festo. "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."

KION Group, a global industrial leader with €11B+ in revenue, has seen similarly strong results, including a 400% improvement in production application performance and faster development cycles across its SAP teams.

The Team

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," said Kristina Shen, Managing Partner and Co-founder at Chemistry. "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."

Accel, which led Nova's seed round, continued their support in the Series A. "Nova has a rare combination of deep technical expertise and real customer obsession," said Accel's Ivan Zhou. "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."

Nova is hiring across engineering, sales, and marketing. Visit their careers page to learn more or explore open roles.