Y Combinator Invests In AI-Based HRTech Startup Leena AI

Gurugram-based HRtech startup Leena AI has become a part of summer class 2018 of US-based investor Y Combinator and has confirmed an investment from the company.

Talking to Inc42, Adit Jain, co-founder told that while building bots, the team learned through its experience with ChatterOn that it’s better to concentrate on a single subject because the underlying machine learning model gets better the more it’s used.

Following this understanding, the team launched Leena AI in August 2017 as a provider of virtual assistants for the workplace to focus on human resources chatbot. As an enterprise virtual agent, currently focusing on HR, Leena AI draws all functionality from ChatterOn, which increases the speed of execution by multi-fold.

“To deliver value, you can’t do many things and must focus on a few. We felt that the biggest pain in the internal shared services space was in HR because of highly fragmented back-end application landscape and decided to go deeper in the HR vertical,” Adit explained.

The bot — Leena AI — can be integrated into Slack, Skype or Workplace by Facebook. It is built and trained using information in policy documents and by pulling data from various back-end systems like Oracle and SAP.

Leena AI: An HR Friend For Employees

In simple words, Leena AI is the friend of employees, on behalf of HR. At present, Leena AI is processing 1000s of conversations with employees every week. All of this data is fed back into the Neural Networks and makes Leena AI better.

It offers more than 12 modules in HR for which it witnesses high traction in Onboarding, HR Services, Transactions and FAQ Automation, Expense Management, Travel Desk Automation, Ideas Bot among others.

At present, the HRtech startup has 12 paying clients including Coca-Cola Vietnam, Pearson, Marico, RPG among others. It further aims to double this number in the next 60 days.

In a Facebook post, Adit Jain said, “We at Leena.AI welcome Y Combinator to be a part of the journey in making a truly intelligent virtual assistant for the workplace.”

The Y Combinator partners are helping the HRtech startup in refining its pitch and making introductions to companies that could make use of this tool. Adit shared: “We are looking to double down on our market leadership in India & APAC (more than 12 paying enterprise customers) and make inroads into the US market.”

Here are some of the interesting highlights of Leena AI:

• As an AI-bot, Leena AI is integrated with HRIS to resolve HR services queries faster and improve the employee experience.
• At the same time, the company claims that it also conducts Dipstick surveys to know the pulse of the organisation with the happiness score and actionable insights for each team.
• Further, Leena AI also schedules continuous conversations of employees with their Managers and collect Data which then turned into insights for Talent conversations and actions.
• The Bot also connects employees with Mentors in aspiring positions, suggest skills required and also recommend relevant courses.

The team considers bot platforms from companies like Microsoft, IBM and other FAQ automation platforms like Talla and AskSpoke as their competitors.

Adit believes Leena AI wins against these because “we have deep verticalised product in HR. We provide 12 pre-built modules with out-of-box connectors for enterprise systems across HR modules. Also, we have our own platform (ChatterOn) which allows us to develop new modules and features 10 times faster than anyone.”

With the aim of closing FY18 with 5x revenue, Leena AI is also looking to do experiments in other verticals like IT, Admin, Finance, Procurement, Sales and MIS. 

Booming HRTech Startups In India

Talking about Indian HRTech startup ecosystem, Adit said: “Indian HR Tech startup environment has started booming since the last couple of years. I believe there is going to be a 20X growth for a lot of startups in the next 3-5 years in this space as companies become more open to experimenting with startups & accepting on-cloud solutions.”

In the HRTech space, Leena AI competes with startups like Bash, Skillate, EdGE Networks, PeopleStrong, Darwinbox among others. The sector has attracted significant attention from the investors recently.

While, Bash uses AI and machine learning (ML) to improve HR processes and employee experiences with its frontend chat interface also available on platforms like Facebook Messenger, Slack etc; Skillate aims to empower the recruiters to hire the best talent using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The Indian HRTech industry is estimated to be worth $6.29 Bn (INR 40,000 Cr). In 2017, nearly $2 Bn was invested in HRTech companies globally.

With the support and mentorship of Y Combinator, which is behind successful companies like Quora and Airbnb among others, Leena AI has found the wings to fly globally with its chatbot applications.

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