Our Investment in Nova: Bringing Frontier Intelligence to Every Enterprise System
Over the last few years, the entire software development lifecycle has reconfigured itself around AI. From co-pilots to autonomous agents, LLMs have transformed how modern developers write, review, and maintain code. But even as millions of engineers now live in products like Cursor and Claude Code, adoption inside the largest and most complex enterprises is still nascent.
The software in these legacy environments exists primarily as infrastructure, underpinning decades-old systems like SAP and Oracle. These codebases are deeply customized, poorly documented, and notoriously difficult to change. As of last year, the state of the art involved teams of consultants and system integrators spending years navigating brittle integrations, security constraints, and obscure business logic to make even the smallest changes in production. In fact, for every dollar of software spend, companies would spend at least seven dollars on implementation and maintenance services. Historically, this dynamic persisted because humans were always the bottleneck, but model intelligence and agent harnesses are finally capable enough to propel this entire ecosystem into the modern AI era.
Nova is leading this transformation by delivering an AI development platform that enables users to generate and transform enterprise software using natural language, starting with SAP. Instead of writing code line by line, teams can describe problems, workflows, and business logic directly, and Nova instantly translates it into working implementations. This also means everybody on the team can now engage with code, from engineers to functional analysts, resulting in faster development cycles, lower costs, and a fundamentally more scalable approach to enterprise software adoption.
The impact is already clear. Companies like Festo and KION Group are running Nova in production at global scale, and seeing 4–5x productivity gains across a wide range of tasks, including functional design, fit-to-standard analysis, modernization, coding, documentation, production issue resolution, and more.
We believe this is the beginning of a much larger shift. As AI moves deeper into the enterprise, the opportunity is not just to accelerate coding, but to redefine how business systems are built, adapted, and maintained. Nova has the potential to become the agentic interface between every enterprise and their core systems.
Founded by Emma, Sam, and Alexander, Nova brings together a rare combination of world-class AI research, engineering, and deep SAP expertise. Emma is a veteran of both Google DeepMind and Meta AI Research, while Sam previously founded Bloom, a modern consumer fintech company with millions of users. Prof. Dr. Alexander Zeier rounds out the co-founding team as the 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 projects. Finally, they are joined by Chief Customer Officer Justin Kershaw, former CIO of Cargill — one of the largest private companies (and SAP customers) in the world.
Today, Nova is emerging from stealth, announcing its seed round led by Accel and Series A led by Chemistry, alongside Conviction, SAP, and a group of leading enterprise executives. Fortune covered the news exclusively here, and the team shared more about what this funding means here.
We’re thrilled to partner with Nova as they redefine how the world’s most important software is built and operated. If you’re excited about working at the frontier of AI and enterprise systems, they’re hiring!
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