From one employee
to six million
It started with one employee. Literally one - the only person at Anand Prajapati's first company, Zuppit Tech Solutions, an AI content summarization tool that never quite found its footing. Most founders walk away from that. Anand pivoted.
The second act was Chatterton, a horizontal chatbot platform that let businesses build their own bots without writing code. It grew fast enough that companies with 1,000+ employees started coming to Anand's team with a specific ask: they wanted internal bots for HR and IT queries. Not customer service. Not marketing. Just employees asking questions like "How do I file for paternity leave?" and "What's our VPN policy?"
That accidental discovery was the company Leena AI. When enterprise HR teams started building the same chatbot for the same questions over and over again, Anand - alongside his IIT Delhi classmates Adit Jain and Mayank Goyal - realized they'd stumbled onto a universal problem: employees at large companies spend more than 60% of their time looking for information. Documents buried in SharePoint. Policies scattered across portals. Tickets that sat in queues for days.
"While we have seen many applications of AI as a consumer, using AI to improve employee productivity still hasn't reached its full potential."
- Anand Prajapati, Co-Founder & CTO, Leena AIY Combinator's Summer 2018 batch gave Leena AI the launch pad. The initial $2M in seed capital turned into something larger: a proof of concept that enterprises would pay real money to get their employees unstuck. By 2020, a $8M Series A validated the category. By September 2021, Bessemer Venture Partners led a $30M Series B, joined by Greycroft and B Capital Group - the fund co-founded by Facebook's Eduardo Saverin.
As CTO, Anand's job was never just to architect software. He was building an organization - starting from zero engineers and scaling to 110+ by the time Leena AI was operating at the enterprise tier. He learned that the company's most important infrastructure investment wasn't a database or a model pipeline. It was embedding security and compliance thinking from day one, before any enterprise customer ever asked for a SOC 2 report.
Today the platform resolves roughly 40% of employee queries autonomously at major enterprise deployments - without a human touching the ticket. Nestlé, Sony, Coca-Cola, HDFC Bank, Puma, and Etihad Airways run their internal support through Leena AI's AI colleagues, across 100+ languages, in 90+ countries. The Reserve Bank of India is on the client list. So is Al-Jazeera.
The 2025 product cycle pushed the frontier further. Voice-enabled AI colleagues arrived in July - meaning employees can now just speak their question to a virtual coworker and get an answer, rather than opening a portal or filing a ticket. In October, Leena AI launched AI Colleague Studio: a first-of-its-kind workspace where enterprise teams can design, test, and deploy their own agentic AI colleagues, calibrated to their specific policies, systems, and workflows. Anand's fingerprints are on every technical decision in that roadmap.