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?”
Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the 2018 timeframe when you were ending the year with 20 customers in that HR use case. What happens in 2019? Help me understand how your HR business is growing and what is the next use case that you go after. Adit Jain: We wanted to focus on HR.
Sramana Mitra: Did you raise money through the YC process? Adit Jain: Yes. We raised a $2 million seed round from Elad Gil. Then a bunch of seed funds joined in. Funder’s Club was one of them. Sramana Mitra: Where did you locate the company? Adit Jain: I shifted to New York because we were
Sramana Mitra: You were doing this in Delhi? Adit Jain: Yes, we spent some time trying to figure out which of our customer segments are using and paying us the most. Sramana Mitra: There were a few customers that were paying you.
Adit and his cofounders started Leena AI in India, bootstrapped to validation, applied to YCombinator, got in. Since then, they’ve built a fantastic, venture-funded global HR Tech business that is successfully competing with Salesforce and ServiceNow. Superb story! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were