Nova Intelligence Raises $31.5M Series A to Accelerate SAP Modernization with AI

Enterprise software has a talent for turning billion-dollar companies into hostage situations run by legacy code. Executives approve massive transformation budgets, consultants flood the building, and underneath it all sits an SAP environment held together by customizations nobody fully understands anymore. One wrong move and payroll hiccups, supply chains freeze, finance teams start sweating. The closer enterprises get to SAP’s 2030 migration deadline, the louder that pressure gets.

That’s why Nova Intelligence pulling in a $31.5M Series A led by Chemistry feels less like another funding headline and more like somebody finally bringing precision into a market drowning in complexity. Total funding now sits north of $40M, with Accel, Conviction, and SAP.iO backing the company. Smart money recognizes pressure when it sees it. SAP’s migration wave is being pegged around $89B, which explains why the enterprise world suddenly cares a lot about modernization speed.

Nova Intelligence isn’t pretending enterprise systems are simple. Emma Qian, Samuel Yang, and Prof. Dr. Alexander Zeier built the company around the reality that SAP environments are layered with years of custom code tied directly to payroll, finance, manufacturing, and supply chains. Pull the wrong thread and operational chaos shows up fast.

Emma Qian brings the DeepMind and Meta AI pedigree, which means the technical ambition is grounded in real research experience. Samuel Yang built Bloom past 2M users before co-founding Nova Intelligence. Then there’s Prof. Dr. Alexander Zeier, co-inventor of SAP HANA and former CTO of Accenture’s SAP Business Group. That combination matters because SAP modernization isn’t a casual software problem. It’s infrastructure surgery inside some of the largest enterprises on earth.

The sharp part of Nova Intelligence’s positioning is its focus. No generic “AI for everything” messaging. The platform targets SAP modernization, custom code analysis, testing, documentation, production issue resolution, and rebuilding legacy environments into cloud-compliant systems before technical debt turns into operational risk. Customers are already seeing movement. Festo reported productivity gains north of 5x, while work that once took 3 months reportedly got compressed into a single day. KION Group saw production application performance improve 400%.

Justin Kershaw stepping in as CCO matters too. Former CIO of Cargill. Former CIO of Eaton. Enterprise buyers trust operators who’ve lived through the complexity themselves. Nova Intelligence fits the timing perfectly. Enterprises are staring at aging SAP infrastructure, modernization mandates, and rising operational risk all at once. Nova Intelligence walked directly into that pressure with tooling built specifically for SAP environments instead of trying to be everything for everyone.