Fostering better HR with Leena AI

Cloud adoption has driven valuable innovation in Human Resources (HR) for all types of organizations. At Bessemer, we’ve been fortunate to partner with many of today’s entrepreneurs building new platforms that better the way teams and companies operate, including CSOD, HiBob, Glint, Papaya Global, and Guild Education. 

A core function of the HR team is answering employee queries—these include standard asks such as, “What’s my dental policy?”, “How many vacation days do I have left?” and even more complex or personal questions. And to further complicate all these inbound requests,  oftentimes employees use a variety of channels to communicate—phone calls, email, slack, HRIS—all fielded by different HR stakeholders and through different HR systems and tools. 

As teams become increasingly remote and distributed, organizations have different policies for different geographies. In today’s environment, one can imagine how the employee experience could suffer! 

Leena AI, the powerful HR analytics platform that provides real-time insights to help facilitate better decision making, strives to change HR quagmires into seamless experiences.

Our investment in Leena stems from the twin beliefs that enterprise HR has to be more consumer-like and conversational. By embracing AI-led software, enterprises can deliver great employee and customer experience in a time where there is a growing shortage of HR talent.

Co-founders Adit Jain, Mayank Goyal, Anand Prajapati were friends in IIT Delhi in India and stumbled upon this problem in HR support while running their college chatbot startup. Since then, Leena has evolved into a single system to receive, understand, and answer most standard queries coupled with a ticketing system to assign, track, and resolve more complex queries. Leena can be used across channels be it email, desktop app, web app, mobile app, slack, teams, etc. and integrates out of the box with more than 100 HR systems including WorkDay, SuccessFactors, Workplace, Kronos, Gusto and most other popular HR tools. Leena also ingests data from all these tools to create a structured knowledge repository for the organization and uses that to continue to answer employee queries. On an ongoing basis, the platform continues to inform its models with company policy updates. 

Today, Leena addresses 70% of all queries sent and then tickets the remaining 30%. For employees, Leena is also becoming the preferred mode of communication and engagement as it’s an easy way to get questions answered via mobile and Slack instances—employees can get in touch with “Leena from HR” without having to change the underlying system of record.

We love to see software that improves the working experience for not only the employees but also for the business, too. Leena AI’s recent momentum demonstrates the enthusiasm from the market. Growing 300% year-over-year with best-in-class sales efficiency and net dollar retention, Leena represents the best of our most recent Global SaaS from India Roadmap. 

As we’ve believed for years at Bessemer, innovation is a borderless endeavor; we continue to witness tomorrow’s great founders start businesses everywhere around the world, not just the traditional Silicon Valley zip code. And Leena AI is one example of a broader macrotrend—India is quickly emerging as a global innovation hub for SaaS businesses. Its customer base is international, too, as users hail from over  60 countries and the platform supports over 40 different languages, and counting. 

We’re excited to partner with Adit, Anand, and Mayank and eager to see them build revolutions of their own and make their mark on the global SaaS community.