The latest offerings in investments, such as funds and structured products, and other notable developments.

Leena AI
Bessemer Venture Partners, along with Greycroft and the investment vehicle of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, have put $30 million into a human resources firm harnessing artificial intelligence.

The company - Leena AI - claims to be “revolutionizing enterprise employee experience”. It raised the money in a Series B financing round, bringing the company's total amount raised to $40 million.

Leena AI plans to expand its employee experience suite to offer products for IT, sales, and finance teams by early 2022, it said in a statement. Since announcing their Series A financing eight months ago, Leena AI customers include Bayer, Al-Jazeera, HDFC Bank, Reserve Bank of India, Houston Methodist, Odessa, and Icertis. The company has also achieved 300 per cent year-to-year revenue growth.

More than 3 million employees across 60 countries now use Leena AI, it said. 

The organization said that firms such as Coca-Cola, Nestle, Abbott, Puma, and P&G already resolve about 40 per cent of employee queries autonomously with Leena AI's machine learning, conversational-AI, and Natural Language Understanding platform.

The Vistria Group
The Vistria Group, a US investment firm, has appointed three partners and opened a Texas office.

Boris Rapoport is joining as partner and co-head of financial services. After serving as a senior advisor for nearly four years, Mona Sutphen is joining as partner and head of investment strategies.

Bill Macatee is joining the firm as partner and head of strategic relationships after serving as a senior advisor; he will lead operations of the Dallas office.

The new office in Dallas will be the firm's first office besides its Chicago headquarters.

In June 2021, The Vistria Group closed its fourth equity fund at $2.68 billion, up from the Fund III close of $1.11 billion. In total, the firm manages $6.5 billion in assets, which are deployed primarily in middle-market companies in healthcare, education, and financial services. 

CaJE
CaJE, a venture capital firm that backs African American female business founders, has gotten off the launch pad. 

Created by female entrepreneur Crystal Etienne, her husband and business partner Jean Etienne, CaJE will enable the next wave of female founders to get the financial support they need to build scalable businesses, CaJE said in a statement yesterday. 

The VC business launches at a time when it says Black female entrepreneurs struggle to obtain funding. It cited data showing that they received 0.34 per cent of total VC money spent in the US this year so far.

"As a female founder and woman of color, I've personally experienced the vast inequalities Black women face when looking to secure venture capital," Crystal Etienne said.

CaJE will offer a new category of venture capital called "Soil" that will be available for deserving female-founded start-ups prior to pre-seed, where it is common to feel "caged-in" while scaling business ideas.