Journey to the future of customer relationships

We started Thena last year on the brink of a global economic downturn and everything was an unknown except that we had a strong thesis:

• Business Communication was rapidly moving over to Messaging Platforms (Slack, Teams & others)
• People lived and worked on these messaging platforms 24x7
• There is an opportunity to disrupt existing email based system of record GTM tools which are not built for messaging platforms and that these platforms could enable modern AI based workflows that can yield significantly better business and customer outcomes.

We dreamt up how this new world could look like and started building — really fast. Our product was out in production in under 3 months with our first pilot customer and even though it had limited functionality, it proposed new paradigms and workflows for collaborating with customers over Slack. Also important to mention that it had lots of bugs and sometimes gut wrenching, embarrassing bugs but we continued shipping — and unshipping — every single day.

It’s amazing how focus compounds - in just under 6 months, we started focusing on our GTM with outreach, proof of concepts, content, and SEO as we ended 2022 with a few paying customers.

Everything hit roof in Q1 2023; our website traffic shot up, word-of-mouth referrals started coming in and we literally started dropping leads on the floor. We scaled fast — our product, our infra, our team across US and India offices and kept winning customers. Just in Q1 alone, we had 50 customers using Thena.

It has just been an year and we have a long way to go. We have the responsibility to usher the industry into this new world of streamlined, outcome driven, AI-enabled customer communication and engagement and are humbled to share that Hemant, Manjot & Rikkin from Lightspeed, and Meka from First Round Capital have come onboard as investors and partners in our seed round to build this future together. None of this could have been possible without our early investors who have been with us since our initial days Pejman, Mar from Pear VC and Ben and Taylor from Tenacity Venture Capital.

PS: Check out Hemant's article on why Lightspeed invested in us.