Leena AI
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Leena AI nabs $8M Series A as it expands from chatbots to HR service platform
When we covered Leena AI as a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2018 cohort, the young startup was firmly focused on building HR chatbots, but in the intervening years it has expanded the vision to a broader HR policy platform. Today, the company announced an $8 million Series A led by Greycroft with help from several individual industry investors.
Company CEO and co-founder Adit Jain says that in 2018 the company was concentrating on building an intelligent virtual assistant for HR-related questions. It allowed employees to ask the bot questions like how many vacation days they have left or what holidays they have off this year.
Over the last couple of years since leaving Y Combinator, the company has moved into broader HR service delivery. “So I’m talking about having an intelligent case management, knowledge management and document management system, which is backing the virtual assistant as well,” Jain explained.
He says that users should think of it as an entire system where the chatbot is the user interface for employees to interact with the HR information on the back end. For example, he says that the knowledge management component is where the chatbots find the answers to questions, and as employees interact with the chatbot, it grows more intelligent based on the feedback from them.
The document management piece enables HR to write or import HR policies and the case management system comes into play when the situation is too complex for the chatbot to handle and it has to be escalated to a human HR representative.
When we spoke to Jain in September 2018 at the time of his startup’s $2 million seed round, he had 16 customers and hoped to have 50 in the next 12-18 months. Today the company has 100 enterprise customers with 300,000 employees using the platform worldwide.
In fact, the pandemic has fueled business with more than half of those customers coming on board this year. He says this is because companies are looking for ways to digitize processes like HR as employees are working from home more.
“This is a trend that’s going to continue as organizations have realized the value of doing things with more and more digital applications taking care of your processes […] especially mundane, repeatable tasks being handed over to technology more and more,” Jain said.
As the business has grown this year, the company has expanded from 30 to 75 employees and he hopes to double that number in the next year. As he does, he has discussed with his lead investor how to build a diverse and inclusive culture at Leena AI .
One thing he is trying to do is raise some money from a diverse group of investors, approximately $400,000, and his hope is that these diverse investors can help him build solid diversity programs as he adds employees to his growing company.
That the startup hasn’t only grown during these turbulent times, but thrived, shows that companies are looking to modernize every part of the enterprise technology stack, and that includes HR.
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Fresh out of Y Combinator, Leena AI scores $2M seed round
Leena AI, a recent Y Combinator graduate focusing on HR chatbots to help employees answer questions like how much vacation time they have left, announced a $2 million seed round today from a variety of investors including Elad Gil and Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.
Company co-founder and CEO Adit Jain says the seed money is about scaling the company and gaining customers. They hope to have 50 enterprise customers within the next 12-18 months. They currently have 16.
We wrote about the company in June when it was part of the Y Combinator Summer 2018 class. At the time Jain explained that they began in 2015 in India as a company called Chatteron. The original idea was to help others build chatbots, but like many startups, they realized there was a need not being addressed, in this case around HR, and they started Leena AI last year to focus specifically on that.
As they delved deeper into the HR problem, they found most employees had trouble getting answers to basic questions like how much vacation time they had or how to get a new baby on their health insurance. This forced a call to a help desk when the information was available online, but not always easy to find.
Jain pointed out that most HR policies are defined in policy documents, but employees don’t always know where they are. They felt a chatbot would be a good way to solve this problem and save a lot of time searching or calling for answers that should be easily found. What’s more, they learned that the vast majority of questions are fairly common and therefore easier for a system to learn.
Employees can access the Leena chatbot in Slack, Workplace by Facebook, Outlook, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams and Cisco Spark. They also offer Web and mobile access to their service independent of these other tools.
Photo: Leena AI
What’s more, since most companies use a common set of backend HR systems like those from Oracle, SAP and NetSuite (also owned by Oracle), they have been able to build a set of standard integrators that are available out of the box with their solution.
The customer provides Leena with a handbook or a set of policy documents and they put their machine learning to work on that. Jain says, armed with this information, they can convert these documents into a structured set of questions and answers and feed that to the chatbot. They apply Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand the question being asked and provide the correct answer.
They see room to move beyond HR and expand into other departments such as IT, finance and vendor procurement that could also take advantage of bots to answer a set of common questions. For now, as a recent YC graduate, they have their first bit of significant funding and they will concentrate on building HR chatbots and see where that takes them.
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Leena AI builds HR chatbots to answer policy questions automatically
Say you have a job with a large company and you want to know how much vacation time you have left, or how to add your new baby to your healthcare. This usually involves emailing or calling HR and waiting for an answer, or it could even involve crossing multiple systems to get what you need.
Leena AI, a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2018 class, wants to change that by building HR bots to answer questions for employees instantly.
The bots can be integrated into Slack or Workplace by Facebook and they are built and trained using information in policy documents and by pulling data from various back-end systems like Oracle and SAP.
Adit Jain, co-founder at Leena AI, says the company has its roots in another startup called Chatteron, which the founders started after they got out of college in India in 2015. That product helped people build their own chatbots. Jain says along the way, they discovered while doing their market research a particularly strong need in HR. They started Leena AI last year to address that specific requirement.
Jain says when 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. “Once you create a bot, for it to really add value and be [extremely] accurate, and for it to really go deep, it takes a lot of time and effort and that can only happen through verticalization,” Jain explained.
Photo: Leena AI
What’s more, as the founders have become more knowledgeable about the needs of HR, they have learned that 80 percent of the questions cover similar topics, like vacation, sick time and expense reporting. They have also seen companies using similar back-end systems, so they can now build standard integrators for common applications like SAP, Oracle and NetSuite.
Of course, even though people may ask similar questions, the company may have unique terminology or people may ask the question in an unusual way. Jain says that’s where the natural language processing (NLP) comes in. The system can learn these variations over time as they build a larger database of possible queries.
The company just launched in 2017 and already has a dozen paying customers. They hope to double that number in just 60 days. Jain believes being part of Y Combinator should help in that regard. The partners are helping the team refine its pitch and making introductions to companies that could make use of this tool.
Their ultimate goal is nothing less than to be ubiquitous, to help bridge multiple legacy systems to provide answers seamlessly for employees to all their questions. If they can achieve that, they should be a successful company.
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