{"id":28745,"date":"2026-05-05T23:33:50","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T23:33:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/28745\/"},"modified":"2026-05-05T23:33:50","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T23:33:50","slug":"exclusive-nova-intelligence-raises-31-5-million-to-bring-ai-to-saps-89-billion-migration-wave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/28745\/","title":{"rendered":"Exclusive: Nova Intelligence raises $31.5 million to bring AI to SAP\u2019s $89 billion migration wave"},"content":{"rendered":"

An estimated 77% of the world\u2019s transactions<\/a> touch an SAP<\/a> system at some point. And most of that code is decades old, written in a proprietary language, and locked inside the workflows at the largest enterprises on earth. It is also, by SAP\u2019s own mandate, on a clock.<\/p>\n

Nova<\/a> Intelligence is betting that\u2019s a generational opening. The San Francisco-based startup has raised a $31.5 million Series A led by Chemistry, Fortune exclusively learned, bringing total funding to more than $40 million. Existing investors Accel, Conviction, and SAP.io\u2014SAP\u2019s venture arm\u2014also participated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nova builds an agentic AI platform for SAP<\/a>\u2014analyzing, modernizing, and generating the custom code that runs payroll, supply chains, and finance functions inside Fortune 500<\/a> environments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re an AI platform for SAP that accelerates the work that companies are doing on SAP across really the full life cycle, from design to development to testing,\u201d co-founder and CEO Emma Qian told Fortune.<\/p>\n

Timing is a key part of Nova\u2019s thesis. SAP has set a mandatory migration deadline<\/a> for customers to move from legacy systems to its modern S\/4HANA platform\u2014recently pushed from 2027 to 2030\u2014and the surrounding services market is enormous. Analysts peg the broader S\/4HANA opportunity<\/a> at more than $89 billion when implementation, upgrades, and ongoing support are included. \u201cWe\u2019ve met companies that are budgeting over a billion dollars just for this migration,\u201d Qian said.<\/p>\n

Qian, a former research engineer at Google<\/a> DeepMind<\/a> and Meta<\/a> AI, founded Nova alongside repeat operator Sam Yang and Professor Alexander Zeier\u2014the co-inventor of SAP HANA<\/a> and former CTO of Accenture\u2019s SAP Business Group. Justin Kershaw, formerly CIO of Cargill<\/a>, a Fortune 25 company and one of SAP\u2019s largest customers, joined as chief customer officer. The company is still just 20 people.<\/p>\n

For Chemistry cofounder Kristina Shen<\/a>, who led the round, the 2030 migration deadline is only a wedge. \u201cThe daily maintenance, development, and operations use cases mean Nova becomes the platform SAP teams rely on indefinitely, and eventually the system of action for all critical systems,\u201d she told Fortune.<\/p>\n

Nova\u2019s bet is that agentic AI can compress that work dramatically. An April 2025 case study<\/a> with Kyndryl showed Nova\u2019s system led to a 75% reduction in manual effort and a 50% cost reduction of modernizing a company\u2019s SAP platform. New customer numbers are tracking similarly. Festo\u2014one of the first 30 SAP customers in the world, running the system since the 1970s\u2014estimated they can work about five times faster, Qian said. \u201cSome really complex programs used to take months to do, but now they take a single day,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

The competitive question is what happens when SAP itself builds more<\/a> of this technology in-house. Qian\u2019s answer leans on alignment. \u201cOur goal is to get customers to a state of their SAP system that\u2019s as good and as optimized as possible,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s where we think we\u2019re actually pretty complementary.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The new capital will fund both R&D and a meaningful expansion of Nova\u2019s go-to-market team targeting flagship enterprise logos. Long term, Qian sees Nova extending beyond SAP. \u201cYour business process doesn\u2019t typically live within one system,\u201d she said. \u201cOur goal is to expand to the other commonly used systems that customers are using as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Chemistry, it\u2019s a bet on a vertical agent in a market the generalized AI giants can\u2019t easily touch. For Qian, the pitch is simpler: the world\u2019s most critical software is finally getting an AI-native co-pilot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An estimated 77% of the world\u2019s transactions touch an SAP system at some point. And most of that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28746,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[179,7493,5044,7543,1122,4563,18907,136,139],"class_list":{"0":"post-28745","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-agentic-ai","8":"tag-agentic-ai","9":"tag-agentic-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-deepmind","11":"tag-google-deepmind","12":"tag-meta","13":"tag-sap","14":"tag-series-a","15":"tag-software","16":"tag-venture-capital"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}