powering the following generation of customer engagement

Today we’re pleased to announce our seed investment in Thena.ai— an organization that helps acquire, service and grow customers on business engagement platforms reminiscent of Slack and Teams. There may be a recent wave of contemporary B2B organizations shifting customer management completely to Slack. Nevertheless, because the number of shoppers grows, managing support tickets, product feature requests, feedback, etc, throughout Slack/Teams becomes difficult and requires recent tools. That is where Thena is available in.

Our investment thesis in Thena, in the beginning, starts with the team. This can be a world-class team. Mike was the co-founder of Branch and helped take it from 0 →$100M ARR. He is available in because the operational ninja who’s just relentless in chasing targets. Along with Govind who was called “ a bulldozer” by the CEO of Branch, this team is as customer-obsessed as they arrive. Unmukt was the Chief Data Architect at Goldman Sachs before leading the AI/ML team at JP Morgan and is already bringing in a few of the most effective generative-AI first ideas into Thena. And at last, Ankit brings all of it together because the CEO with a strategic vision across product and engineering, and incredible experiences constructing and managing teams globally at Branch.

Second, there may be a “slackification of labor” occurring where older systems of records reminiscent of Salesforce and Jira are serving because the backends while systems of engagement reminiscent of Slack and Teams have gotten primary platforms where work happens. Salesforce acquisition of Slack has accelerated this trend. Customer communication is a large category undergoing this very shift, further accelerated by covid. Slack Connect had ~100K enterprise customers in mid-’22 (50% of all Slack users) and is growing faster than Slack. Several of our portcos use Slack Connect as a part of their GTM motion and emerging case studies (1, 2, 3, 4) indicate higher conversion/retention when customers are engaged real-time over Connect vs email/Jira. In response, MSFT also launched their version of Teams Connect in Jul ’22.

And at last, customer support and engagement is one in all the oldest and largest TAM in SaaS that’s ripe for automation-led disruption. Gartner estimates the worldwide spending on RPA (easy if-this-then-that automation) alone to achieve $2.4B in 2022 (pre-covid estimates), growing at a 37% CAGR. Automation is growing in importance with over 85% of huge and really large organizations having deployed some type of RPA by 2022 representing a complete of $13–15B TAM upside for those who crack complex types of automation across mid-market and Fortune-2000. The reasoning capabilities of generative AI are an ideal fit for this category. Bringing in state-of-the-art automation, AI-first approaches to summarizing customer sentiment and solving their pain points, and de-fragmenting workflows right into a single channel like Slack where everyone already sits 24×7 is vital to unlocking this potential.

We first met the Thena team a 12 months ago and tracked them as they built out a incredible product and team. Over the past 12 months, the team grew steadily, Ankit and Govind began to separate time between India and SF, Mike joined soon after, while Unmukt built out the tech and product team from India — a mix we see in quite a lot of SaaS corporations from this a part of the world. Thena began commercializing earlier in 2023 and saw some tremendous traction and really positive feedback from prime quality customers reminiscent of Incident.io, Mixpanel, Branch, Sprig, Guru, BoostUp and 50+ more!