Thena, a customer communications and intelligence platform, which helps businesses manage customers on messaging platforms, has raised $5 million in Seed funding, co-led by Lightspeed and First Round Capital. 

Thena’s product enables Slack and other messaging platforms to be used at scale for B2B customer communications that solves their biggest pain points. Specifically, it helps customer-facing teams manage tools like Slack by providing analytics and insights into how customers are engaging with a company, which was previously a manual process.  It also resolves for connection via integrations with internal tools like Zendesk, HubSpot, and Salesforce. This results in higher customer retention, increased revenue, and more efficient employees.

Thena was founded in April 2022 by Ankit Saxena, Govind Kavaturi, Mike Molinet, and Unmukt Raizada. Molinet also co-founded Branch in 2014, playing a central role to the brand’s growth and operational scale. Seeing the massive market opportunity, Molinet left Branch to join Thena as a co-founder.

“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 use cases for messaging platforms like Slack are rapidly expanding. What started as an internal replacement for email is now becoming the primary channel B2B organizations use to communicate with customers and prospects. Innate features like rapid response times, improved security compared to email, and ease of access drove this shift. But the scale at which organizations now rely on tools like Slack also sparked a new set of challenges, including a lack of organization, analytics, and integration with existing systems. 

This is where Thena comes in. Sitting in between B2B organizations and their messaging platforms, it converts them from messaging tools to robust communications system capable of improving performance across sales, marketing, and customer support.  

“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 Molinet. “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.”

With customers including Branch, Embrace, Mixpanel, WorkRamp, and Spotdraft already working with Thena, the seed funding will primarily be invested in continuing to scale its product and recruit top talent capable of driving and supporting rapid company growth. 

Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed added, “Thena not only has an inspirational vision and mission, but its core team has previously scaled a $100 million 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.”

Meka Asonye, Partner at First Round added, “As business communication moves from email to messaging, B2B companies need to be where their customers are. We're thrilled to back Thena and excited to see them turn platforms like Slack and Teams intro true customer communication channels with the analytics and integrations companies need to better serve their customers.”

Prior to this round, which brings their total funding to $7.2M,  Thena raised $2.2 million in pre-seed funding from Pear VC and Tenacity Venture Capital.