Ema: ai employees that do enterprise workflows
An AI employee platform for enterprises that automates HR, IT and finance work.
Problem it solvesEnterprise software still needs people to operate the workflows it tracks.
Ema's team announced a Series B and says the product automates enterprise work for HR, IT and finance teams. The post says customers are expanding usage, with over 90% expanding beyond their first use case.
surojit
@surojit
On the back of our Series B raise, I sent this note to our team internally. Someone suggested I post it here as well: Team, TL;DR: The announcement landed and the response was strong. Enjoy it, then get back to work. The praise and the skepticism are both noise. The plan has not changed, the opportunity in front of us is much bigger than a funding round, and the people in this company are what make it possible. What happened yesterday Three years ago I stood on a stage and said SaaS is dead. The room laughed. Yesterday we announced our Series B, and the response was very different. TechCrunch ran it under the headline that AI is starting to eat into enterprise software and services. SiliconANGLE, Yahoo Finance and most of the Indian business press followed. More than 50 posts tagged Ema on LinkedIn in the first day—investors, customers, advisors who were at the whiteboard with us three years ago, and many of you, writing about what you built in your own words. Thank you. Those posts meant a great deal to me. The facts, so we are all precise about them: $77M, led by Creaegis, with Accel, S32, Prosus, Hitachi Ventures and Wipro Ventures all increasing their investment. $140M raised in total, at more than 4x our last valuation. These are people who spent months in our data room, talked to our customers without us in the room, and stress-tested every number we have ever shown them. Every major existing investor came back, and every one of them wrote a bigger cheque. Fewer than 1% of startups ever raise more than $100M, and the median company takes 4.9 years to get from seed to Series B. We did it in two and a half, with 50x revenue growth in 24 months. They did not fund a story. They funded what you built: an MVP shipped in three months while others slipped weekly. ~98% of HR Tier 1–2 work automated with zero hallucinations. 50 use cases across 240,000 employees without a single third-party consultant. Customers who nearly double their spend after the first deployment. Every line of that has your fingerprints on it. About the noise The skeptics say the metrics are company-sourced, bookings are not ARR, most GenAI pilots never reach production, we still have to prove this scales, the frontier labs will compete with us, and the market is a bubble. Some of these are fair questions. We chose not to share ARR publicly, and every number in the press is ours rather than an auditor's. The proof that matters is whether customers renew and expand. So far they do: more than 90% have expanded beyond their first use case. The optimists say SaaS is dead, Ema has won, and this is a generational company. I appreciate the belief. But a raise is not an accomplishment in itself. It is a group of serious people looking closely at what we have built and deciding to back where it goes next. I am humbled by it. But the real accomplishment is still ahead of us. Both groups are forming a view from the outside, based on a press release and a few articles. We have something they do not: the data on how customers actually use Ema, and whether they come back. Our job is to keep adding to that data, not to argue about it. Outcome-based pricing keeps us honest here. We get paid when work gets done. Our customers hold us to a higher standard than any commentator will. Our values say it plainly: we have to earn our place in the world, and we celebrate our successes but never get carried away. That is humility, and a week like this is when it counts most. We have built something real, and we have a long way to go. Thank the people who congratulated us. Do not engage with the criticism, and do not get carried away by the praise. Neither changes what we need to do this quarter. The opportunity ahead I want to be clear about what this capital is for, because it is not for a bigger version of what we have today. We are going to change the entire enterprise software stack over time, not one category of it. For twenty years enterprise software has worked the same way: you buy the software, then you hire people to operate it. ServiceNow tracks the ticket; a person closes it. Workday holds the record; a person runs the process. Every large SaaS application is a system of record with thousands of people doing the work around it. AI Employees change that. When software can do the work itself, the work moves to the AI Employee and the system of record becomes a database. That is the SaaS-is-dead thesis, and it is now visible in our own customers. Some are already on the way to replacing large SaaS applications completely. Others are reducing their dependency one workflow at a time. The incumbents see the same shift. ServiceNow and SAP have moved this year to meter or restrict outside AI agents on their systems, and Workday has said charging for agent access is a business opportunity. These are formidable companies and they will fight to defend their position. It does not change where the work is going. So here is the vision, plainly: every enterprise will run on agentic AI, and Ema will be the platform they run it on. Our HR, IT and Finance Hubs are the first surfaces — HCM and ITSM, the territory Workday and ServiceNow occupy today. We have a real chance to replace them, and many others, at some of the largest companies in the world. And it does not stop there. Every SaaS application that exists to route work to a person will eventually be replaced by software that does the work. We intend to be the company that replaces them. Underneath the market logic is the reason we started Ema: we want jobs to feel wonderful again—less admin and copy-pasting, more of the work people actually signed up to do. At Wipro that means 3M queries a year answered in seconds instead of days. Multiply that across every enterprise and we are adding to the world's productive capacity, not just replacing software. This is why we believe in our mission 'Grow World GDP by Transforming Every Business with Universal AI Employees". It is supposed to be bold, supposed to be timeless. We won't do it in any other way. None of this happens in a quarter. It happens over years, one production deployment at a time. Very few companies get to attempt it with production proof, capital and the team already in place. We do. What it asks of us What we announced on Wednesday came from decisions made twelve and eighteen months ago, most of them on ordinary days. What we do this quarter is what gets highlighted by the external world in 2028. Three asks: Ship at a pace that feels slightly uncomfortable. Well-funded competitors will come for this market. Speed compounds faster than anyone can copy an idea. Stay close to the mess. Our edge is earned in rooms with customers, not in planning docs. Hold the bar when nobody is checking. Companies are defined by the ordinary Thursday, not the launch day. Our customers had the same tickets and SLAs on Wednesday that they had on Tuesday. Our job did not change. People are everything Capital does not build a company. People do. Everything in this note—the numbers, the customers, the coverage—was built by all of you across Mountain View, Bengaluru, London and Vancouver, most of it on days when nobody was watching. I do not want that lost in a week about money. As we grow, the one thing I refuse to lose is a direct line to each of you. The best ideas for making Ema better will not come from the top. They will come from the people closest to the work and closest to our customers. That is why I started the small-group coffee chats a few weeks ago: no agenda, no slides, just an open and confidential conversation about what is working, what is broken, and what you would change if you were in my seat. We will keep rotating until I have met with everyone, and I am acting on what I hear. Please keep bringing the hard truths. Nothing is off the table. We are here to build the best company in the world. That only happens if every one of us has a voice in shaping it, and if we protect the culture that got us here: honest feedback, real ownership, growing talent from within and hiring the best talent from outside, and helping each other. This round does not change any of that. It funds it. So, thank you. To the engineering, product and design teams who kept shipping through security reviews, complex integrations and go-lives at odd hours. To the forward-deployed and customer teams who stay with customers until the work is actually done. To sales, partnerships and marketing, who took Ema into rooms we could not have reached alone. To operations, finance, hr people, who keep the company running and rarely get the headline. And to your families, who share the cost of the hours this takes. None of this exists without you. One last thing To anyone who has wondered whether this is worth it: the people with the most information and the most to lose just said yes, louder than last time. I believe in this more today than I did on day one, and I did not think that was possible. The noise will fade by Monday. The opportunity will not. Let's go build! 📷 -Surojit (edited)
- Funding
- $77M
- Series B
- Funding raised
- $140M
- total
- Revenue growth
- 50x
- 24 months
- Customers expanding
- 90%
- first use case
