The AI Platform for the Software That Runs the World: Our Series A in Nova Intelligence

AI coding tools have transformed software development. But there's a massive blind spot.

The most critical code at the world's largest enterprises — the code running finance, supply chain, manufacturing, and logistics for 92% of the Global 2000 — lives on SAP. And the AI coding wave has barely touched it.

That's not an accident. SAP has its own programming language (aptly named Advanced Business Application Programming or ABAP), its own deployment model, and code that can't be searched or versioned the way normal code can. General-purpose AI tools simply weren't built for it. Every dollar in SAP software spend drives roughly seven dollars in services and consulting. And companies are now staring down a mandatory, multi-billion dollar migration deadline — SAP has set 2030 as the cutoff for its legacy ECC platform, requiring every major customer to move to S/4HANA. For many, that's the largest IT project they'll ever run.

The problem is enormous. The solution didn't exist... until Nova.

Bohan had known Emma Qian, founder & CEO, for years; she was the founder of the first startup he worked at in the early days of the LLM wave. When she shared what she was building over lunch, we immediately knew we had to lean in.

After our first meeting, the reaction was unanimous: this was a founder who saw something others didn’t and had the technical depth to go after it.  Beyond just the strength of the founders, we felt this was a rare opportunity for an exciting thesis - massive entrenched spend, a hard migration deadline accelerating urgency, and a technical moat that general-purpose AI cannot easily replicate.  Unlike the open internet, SAP is not an accessible training corpus.  You can’t train your way into this.

The customer conversations sealed it. Festo is a German automation leader and one of the first 30 SAP customers in history. Hasso Plattner personally helped implement R/1 there in the 1970s. Their CIO, Jörn Weigle, didn't mince words: "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."

Documentation that once took three months now takes a single day. Tribal knowledge that used to live in the heads of a handful of senior developers is now accessible across the entire organization. Projects that were previously out of scope are now viable.

The team has deep founder-market fit with a rare combination of AI-native builders and SAP workflow expertise. Emma comes from Google DeepMind and Facebook AI Research. Co-founder and CTO Sam Yang built Bloom to 2 million users and profitability. Their Chief Scientist, Prof. Alexander Zeier, co-invented SAP HANA, helping to engineer the very platform Nova is now transforming. Chief Customer Officer Justin Kershaw was previously CIO of Cargill, one of the largest SAP customers in the world. And SAP's own venture arm, SAP.io, has backed the company in both rounds — the kind of strategic validation that only comes when the largest player in an ecosystem sees a partner, not a threat.

Building AI that works inside SAP requires solving problems that don't exist anywhere else — proprietary languages, deeply customized environments, and a deployment model unlike modern software. Nova has spent the past year building the foundational technology that makes AI agents genuinely capable inside SAP. The platform adapts to each organization's unique workflows and gets smarter the more a team uses it. The 2030 migration deadline is a powerful wedge, but the daily development, maintenance, and operations use cases are what make Nova the platform SAP teams rely on indefinitely.

The deeper we went, the more convinced we became. This is the right approach, and Nova has the team to pull it off. SAP runs the backbone of global enterprise. Nova is building the intelligence layer on top of it.

We're thrilled to announce that Chemistry is leading Nova Intelligence's Series A, alongside Accel, Conviction, and SAP.io. The company has raised $40M across the Seed and the Series A. Nova is growing across engineering, sales, and marketing. Check out their open roles here.