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Matt Aucella Sells the Part of an SAP Transformation Nobody Wants to Think About
After years selling technology from the classroom to the corporate core, smartShift’s sales chief has learned where big transformations get stuck: in the old code everyone depends on and nobody wants to touch.
The SAP Upgrade Bottleneck smartShift Turns Into a Five-Week Job
Its target is not SAP itself. It is the decades of custom ABAP code wrapped around SAP - the technical debt that turns a necessary upgrade into a risky, expensive rewrite.
Nova Intelligence
Nova Intelligence builds an agentic AI platform purpose-built for SAP teams. Its AI agents analyze, document, modernize, and generate the custom code that runs payroll, supply chains, and finance inside Fortune 500 systems, mapping legacy custom code to SAP standard to cut complexity and cost. Founded in 2024 by a Google DeepMind researcher, a repeat founder, and the co-inventor of SAP HANA, Nova targets the roughly $89 billion S/4HANA migration wave companies must complete by 2030. It has raised $40M total, including a $31.5M Series A led by Chemistry.
Emma Qian
Emma Qian is the co-founder and CEO of Nova Intelligence, a San Francisco startup building an agentic AI platform that analyzes, modernizes, and generates custom code for SAP systems. A former research engineer at Google DeepMind and software engineer at Meta AI, Caltech-trained Qian left frontier AI research to attack one of enterprise software's least glamorous and most expensive problems: the migration of decades of custom SAP code to S/4HANA. Nova has raised over $40 million, including a $31.5 million Series A led by Chemistry with backing from Accel, Conviction, and SAP.io, and counts customers like Festo who report working roughly five times faster. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.