Building a Global HR Tech Business from India: Adit Jain, CEO of Leena AI (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: At the end of 2020, the product was still that full workflow HR solution?

Adit Jain: We have added two more products in 2020. When Covid hit, a lot of organizations came to us and said, “Leena is doing HR service delivery, but can Leena proactively go to employees and do pulse checks?” I don’t know how familiar you are with the entire employee engagement gamut. They said, “Employees love Leena. Why can’t Leena go to employees and ask questions?” It was in the making in late 2019, but it got a great boost in 2020. Now onboarding is completely digital.

Sramana Mitra: So the same buyer. That’s great. What were the price points of these two add-ons?

Adit Jain: The pricing structure remained the same. Employee engagement in the US sells anywhere between $50 per employee per year for the SMB, $30 for the midmarket. For enterprises, it depends on the deal size. Our largest customer right now is a 270,000 employee company.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of how you generate leads, you’re talking about small to medium businesses and then 270,000 employees. That’s a big gamut. How do you do lead generation and qualification?

Adit Jain: Our lead generation is extremely marketing-driven. In our organization, the SDR function is reporting completely to the marketing team. It’s not a sales-led growth model. We have three or four ways of getting those leads. The first is completely organic. We have our existing customers who are doing word of mouth and telling other people how great Leena AI is. They’re raving about our solution. The second is another part of inbound where it’s driven by us doing lots of ads and paid marketing. We do LinkedIn campaigns and Google Ads.

Sramana Mitra: Targeting the HR leaders.

Adit Jain: Exactly. The third channel is pure outbound. Using the SDR’s, they are given target accounts all across the globe. They go and speak to relevant people and make them see the value of Leena AI. The fourth is partner channels. It’s not developed for us yet.

Sramana Mitra: You mentioned that you have successfully competed with Salesforce and ServiceNow. If I’m gathering this right, you verticalized on the HR use case and completed the workflow around HR starting with responses to inquiries. I know the portfolios of Salesforce and ServiceNow. I don’t think they’re verticalized to that extent. Is that the answer to the competitive strategy question?

Adit Jain: Exactly. They’re not intelligent at all. ServiceNow’s HR offering and Salesforce is basically a ticketing software. Leena AI’s pitch is, we’re going to save 80% of your tickets from even being created. We are going to kill them before they’re created.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about where you are at the end of 2021. What are the metrics?

Adit Jain: We have 200 plus customers globally. We have reached around $10 million. We also raised our Series B recently led by Bessemer Venture Partners. We have an amazing set of partners. I’m very excited about what the future holds.

Sramana Mitra: What is the distribution on the team between New York and India?

Adit Jain: Across the US, we have around 60. We have a total of 280 people today. We have about 20 folks in Southeast Asia.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a Global HR Tech Business from India: Adit Jain, CEO of Leena AI
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