Gurugram-based AI-powered HRtech startup Leena AI has raised around ₹14.4 crores ($2 million) in seed funding from a host of investors including Elad Gil, investor and advisor to companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart, OpenDoor, and Pinterest, and Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.
Other investors that participated in the round include FoundersClub Fund, Quiet Capital, and Cathexis Ventures, along with other angel investors.
The funds raised will be used to development of the product and expanding to international markets.
Leena AI was founded by Adit Jain, Anand Prajapati, and Mayank Goyal in 2015. The startup provides an AI-powered HR assistant to help employees with queries regarding vacation time left, health insurance, among others, to improve their overall experience by saving time. Employees can access the Leena chatbot to resolve their queries in Slack, Workplace by Facebook, Outlook, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco Spark. It is built and trained using information in policy documents and by pulling data from various back-end systems like Oracle and SAP.
The startup also leverages the natural language processing to feed the platform with the conversations to enable learning and enhancing the performance of the chatbot. Leena AI has a number of paying clients including Coca-Cola, Axis Bank, Reliance Capital, Pearson, and Marico, among others.
The startup claims to have had more than 13 million conversations with around 1,00,000 employees across 22 countries. This Gurugram-based startup is one of the Indian startups to be a part of Y Combinator’s summer cohort of 2018, also raising funds from the US-based accelerator.
Other players in the HRtech space competing with Leena AI include Bash, Darwinbox, Skillate, PeopleStrong, and EDGE Networks, among others. Indian HRtech industry is expected to be a billion dollar industry according to market estimates, as this industry grows owing to the technological advancements and as companies focus more on employees.
