B2B SaaS startup Thena raises $5M from Lightspeed, others

B2B SaaS startup Thena.ai, which operates customer communications and intelligence platform, has raised $5 million in a seed funding round co-led by Lightspeed and First Round Capital for product innovation and company expansion.

Prior to the current round, Thena raised $2.2 million in a pre-Seed round from Pear VC and Tenacity Venture Capital. So far, it has raised over $7.2 million in funding from investors.

Founded in April 2022 by Ankit Saxena, Govind Kavaturi, Mike Molinet, and Unmukt Raizada, Thena is a customer engagement layer designed to help businesses acquire, service, and grow their B2B customers on messaging platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams.

The startup enables companies to manage their customer channels at scale by providing them with a platform to keep track of customer issues on messaging platforms, gain visibility into customer interactions, and connect those channels to other systems like Zendesk and Salesforce.

Statements:

"The inevitable shift is here. Business communication is moving from email to messaging platforms, and we're on the front lines helping organizations meet their customers where they already work," said Ankit Saxena, CEO and co-founder of Thena. "But it goes beyond better management of communications and relationships. Our AI models synthesize data across communication channels, equipping companies with their own fine-tuned models that enable them to make customer-centric decisions at scale and improve bottom line."

"The market demand is already massive and growing every day. As soon as businesses learn that a service like Thena exists, they sign on," said Mike Molinet, co-founder of Thena. "Thena is different from any startup I've been a part of because there's such a pull from the market that has naturally fallen into using Slack and Teams to engage with customers. We don't need to convince people that the future of B2B communications will occur on real-time messaging channels or of the potential market size. We can immediately spend our time on building the best product and solving our customers' most critical challenges."

Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed added, "Thena not only has an inspirational vision and mission, but its core team has previously scaled a $100M ARR business from the ground up, proving their ability to build through market cycles with tenacity, innovation, and speed. Their vision of the future of all customer communication " from static to dynamic; from passive to real time; from manual to AI-first " was extremely compelling and we are excited to get started."

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