Vivek Mehta and his two co-founders, Sagar Lathia and Omar Noorzay, founded Weeve for a simple reason — to help managers and employees communicate better, ultimately making a company's work more fluid and, well, pleasant.
Specifically, the Austin-based startup seeks to “reduce employee attrition, one conversation at a time,” according to its website.
“Weeve reduces turnover at businesses by providing a better way to understand and act on employee feedback,” its website continues. “[It] replace[s] sterile annual surveys with Kim — an AI chatbot that has candid conversations with employees at scale."
The startup was a result of the team's tech backgrounds where they grew to understand what made good communication so important — and its relationship to job satisfaction.
“It uses a unique combination of empathy that you don’t really get from a survey, and anonymity that you don’t really get from face-to-face conversation."
“Those patterns [we saw] were that people were unfulfilled at their jobs and they’re being unheard, and they didn’t feel valued,” Mehta said. “We saw the impact it had on people quitting their jobs. That made us passionate and interested in the problem.”
The team soon learned that 75 percent of employees leave their jobs because of their boss, not their specific job. While both parties often want success for each other, the right tools and strategies haven't been established to communicate how to best achieve mutual goals.
“The real issue was a lack of understanding between employees and management,” Mehta explained. “Our vision was to try and strengthen that connection, because managers want their team to be happy and employees want to do a good job and be fulfilled at work.”
The bootstrapped company looks to do this via an AI chatbot named Kim. The tool organically communicates with employees to better understand their issues and their needs, virtually "hanging out" with the employee (who can then reach out via Slack or SMS text message).
Unlike a survey or poll, the bot-to-employee conversation can better pull out insights from the employee that a manager might miss or not even consider.
“It uses a unique combination of empathy that you don’t really get from a survey, and anonymity that you don’t really get from face-to-face conversation,” Mehta said. “That combination really gives you deeper, more meaningful feedback that lets managers make more useful and actionable choices.”
For interested companies wanting to get started with Weeve, the startup will give potential clients a quick consulting session to figure out the cultural goals of both the organization and team using the product. Then, the companies upload the list of employees to the system and the conversation with the chatbot can automatically start.
As for the company's Cincinnati connection, it recently participated in tech accelerator UpTech's most recent cohort. In addition to funding as part of the program, they got an opportunity to grow their company and present during the accelerator's recent demo day.
“We really didn’t know what to expect,” said Mehta of coming to Cincinnati for the accelerator. “But we found that Midwest hospitality is a thing that crosses over into business. Everyone we speak to is a future friend or mentor."
