HRTech Leena AI Raises $30 Mn From Bessemer, B Capital For Its “Siri For Employees” Application

New York and Gurugram-based HRtech startup Leena AI has raised $30 Mn in a Series B funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners and existing investor Greycroft. The round also saw participation from Facebook cofounder, Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital Group.

The funds will be used for product innovation and development in order to meet global demand for the platform, cofounder Adit Jain told Inc42. “We are also hiring in all roles across technology, engineering, marketing, sales teams, and customer success,” Jain added.

Founded in 2015 by Jain, Mayank Goyal and Anand Prajapati, Leena AI had started its journey with ChatterOn, a platform that helps people build personal chatbots. In 2017, the company launched its chatbot as a provider of virtual assistants for the workplace — human resource chatbots — to process employees’ conversations.

The chatbot — dubbed as “Siri for employees” — can be integrated into 100+ platforms such as Slack, Skype or Workplace by Facebook. It is built and trained using the information in policy documents and by pulling data from various back-end systems like Oracle and SAP.

Prior to this, the company had raised $8 Mn in a Series A round from Greysoft in 2020 and a $2 Mn seed funding round from a host of Silicon Valley investors, back in 2018. The AI-based startup was also a part of Y Combinator Summer Batch, 2018, along with Indian startups ZiffyHomes, Khatabook and OkCredit.

“By ‘Siri for employees’ we mean that we intend to create a platform that can be a single stop for all employee queries; like people ask Siri all kinds of stuff, we aim to be the conversational AI platform, in which employees can come to, with any and every query,” Jain added.

The current round of financing comes on the heels of significant momentum, the company said in a statement, as it has added new customers, including Bayer, Al-Jazeera, HDFC Bank, Reserve Bank of India, Houston Methodist, Odessa, and Icertis, achieving 300% year-on-year revenue growth.

Its existing clientele includes Coca-Cola, Nestle, Abbott, Puma, and P&G in 60+ countries where it claims to be autonomously resolving 40% of employees’ queries such as policy questions, knowledge management, generating employee documents on demand, and managing employee tickets.

According to Gartner, the global conversational AI market is currently valued at $4.8 Bn and is predicted to reach $14 Bn in 2025. The report also predicted that by 2022, 70% of white-collar workers globally will interact with conversational platforms on a daily basis.

The growth would largely be fuelled by the changing consumer preference for AI-powered customer service, positive ROI on deployed AI-enabled conversational solutions, and an increasing number of providers in the market.

Conversational AI Startups competing with Leena AI include Lightspeed-backed Yellow AI (formerly Yellow Messenger), Reliance-backed Haptik, Chiratae Ventures-backed Uniphore among others.