The growing trend of taking your business online has caused a massive shift in the industry, leading to unforeseen fortune for organizations that provide smart solutions to make this process easier. Leena AI, an employee helpdesk platform, has raised $30 million in its latest Series B financing round led by Bessemer Venture Partners and included participation from Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital Group and existing investor Greycroft.
With this, the start-up has raised $40 million to date. This also comes soon after the Y Combinator-backed company had raised $8 million in its Series A funding round and $2 million as part of its seed round.
According to the enterprise SaaS company, the proceeds from the funding round would be used towards the innovation of products to meet the global demand for the platform for new and existing customers, enter into new markets such as Europe and North America, and fulfill the start-up’s plans of growing its employee experience suite to products for its IT, Finance, and Sales teams by early 2022.
“We intend to be the ‘Siri for employees’ and help employees get faster resolutions to their requests. Legacy internal helpdesks are not user-friendly, are tough to deploy, and lack intelligence. Leena AI Employee Experience Suite deeply understands enterprise HR support tickets to solve this very difficult problem at the world’s top enterprises.” said Adit Jain, co-founder, and CEO, Leena AI. “This investment will help us further elevate the enterprise employee experience through AI-powered conversations and insights.”
Founded by Jain, Mayank Goyal, and Anand Prajapati, the autonomous conversational AI platform has around three million users across 60 countries and is expected to reach 100 million users over the next 12 months. Unlike several of its rival conversational AI platforms, the start-up focuses on human resources (HR) and leverages advanced machine learning (ML), AI, and Natural Language Understanding technologies to allow companies to automate conversations through a chatbot-like technology. It performs tasks such as answering policy-related questions, knowledge management, and generating employee documents on-demand, thereby freeing personnel to focus on other areas.
Recent times have seen Leena AI’s customer list grow to include prominent names such as Bayer, Al-Jazeera, HDFC Bank, Reserve Bank of India, Houston Methodist, Odessa, and Icertis. According to Leena AI, which counts names such as Coca-Cola, Nestle, and Puma as its customers, it is soon going to reach annual recurring revenue of $10 million, a 300% growth year-on-year. “The company’s AI-led innovation enables enterprises to deliver great employee experiences across functional areas,” Anant Vidur Puri, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said.
“HR is an area in desperate need of disruption, with many slow, manual processes overwhelming HR departments. The Leena AI team has been able to bring HR into the modern era through automation and machine learning, enabling better employee engagement,” said Mark Terbeek, Partner at Greycroft. “We believe Leena AI is well-positioned to revolutionize the enterprise employees experience in the era of hybrid work.”
