Darwinbox, Asia’s leading enterprise HR technology platform, today announced a USD 15 million Series B investment. This round was led by Sequoia India along with participation from existing investors Lightspeed India Partners, Endiya Partners and 3one4 Capital. With the new funding, the company plans to accelerate its Asia expansion and product innovation.
Darwinbox’s cloud-based end-to-end Human Resource Management (HRMS) platform caters to HR needs across the entire employee lifecycle (hire-to-retire).
“Talent is core to the success of any business. Our mission from day one has been to build a human capital management system, that puts employees squarely at the center and enables orgs to engage, empower & elevate the potential of their workforce. This has made us the HR platform of choice for 200+ leading Asian enterprises,” says Jayant Paleti, Co-founder, Darwinbox. “Partnering with marquee investors will accelerate our penetration into the Asian Enterprise market, drive product innovation and maximize the value delivered to customers.”
Harshjit Sethi, Principal, Sequoia Capital India LLP, said, “Recruiting, retaining and upskilling talent is a top priority of every company today. Darwinbox is the clear emerging leader in the fast-growing cloud-based HR management software space in Asia. The Darwinbox team combines world-class product sensibilities with a unique understanding of local nuances in HR in Asia to provide a compelling and delightful product to their customers, a sentiment we heard expressed by several HR leaders. Sequoia India is thrilled to partner with the team to help them expand aggressively in the coming years.”
Recognized as one of the most preferred HCM solutions in APAC (Gartner 2018 1), Darwinbox has over 200 customers with 500,000+ employees spread across 50 countries worldwide. Some of their notable customers ranging from multi-sectoral conglomerates to technology unicorns include Arvind, Adani, Mahindra, Kotak, GVK group companies, Bharti AXA, Dr.Reddy’s, Bisleri, Nivea, Swiggy, Paytm, and Times Internet, etc. The company has a dominant presence in sectors such as Pharma, Healthcare, Manufacturing, BFSI, Consumer Products, Technology and Retail.
Darwinbox operates in the same space as traditional tech giants like SAP, Oracle and Workday, but has successfully established itself in the market, competing against them and displacing them in multiple organizations. The high level of configurability, ease of use (with mobile centricity) and faster time-to-value are some of the key reasons why the product has seen immense traction in the large enterprise segment.
“At Adani Wilmar, our vision is to have an end-to-end HR platform that is agile, intuitive, and functionally deep. With Darwinbox, we have moved a step closer to achieving all that we desired for. Not only has Darwinbox’s HR technology helped our workforce to get aligned with the business goals – the team understood our context like no other and has been our rock throughout the process,” said Satyendra Gaur, Head HR, Adani Gas & Ex- Head HR, Adani Wilmar.
Since raising its Series A funding in June 2017, the company’s customer base has increased by 5X and revenue metrics have grown by 900%. “Asia has a unique mix of decades-old conglomerates, new high-growth enterprises, millennial-heavy populations, regional multinationals and diversity of languages and cultures. Enterprise products in Asia need to be consumer-grade in terms of usability, yet highly configurable for all the heterogeneity in use-cases. Darwinbox understands and delivers on this need better than global providers to lead the market in enterprise-grade human capital management solutions,” said Dev Khare, Partner, Lightspeed India Partners.
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“Our product focus is on solving the challenges of people function in large and diverse organizations with complex structures using the best of technologies while providing stellar user experience through intuitive and interactive interfaces. We will invest heavily in further strengthening our platform, especially our analytical layer with AI and ML capabilities to aid decision making,” said Chaitanya Peddi, Co-founder of Darwinbox who leads their product development and engineering.
“Asia HR technology market is estimated to be at USD 9 billion. Increase in mobile users in the geography meant newer possibilities in the way organizations can engage and empower their employees. Enterprises in Asia are migrating to the cloud at a much faster pace than the entire world and we are excited to lead the charge with cutting edge HR technology that is tailored to the Asian context,” said Rohit Chennamaneni, Co-founder, Darwinbox.
“In the last 4 years we have seen our Swiggy family grow from 500 to 10000+ employees. Darwinbox has been a solid partner in this journey enabling us to build hr processes/systems at Scale. We were early adopters of Darwinbox and the partnership has been amazingly seamless. Strongly believe Darwinbox is one of the most agile, robust and ever-evolving HR Technology platforms in the market today,” said Girish Menon, Head HR, Swiggy.
Sateesh Andra, Endiya Partners on Endiya’s journey with Darwinbox, “True to our founding principles at Endiya, Darwinbox had the innovation edge right from the word go. The Human Resources SaaS market opportunity size in Asia is fairly large and growing at a rapid pace. Darwinbox has quickly established itself as a market leader in this segment and garnered leading Market share, attention, and the desired value for all its clients. What powers the future of Darwinbox, is the team’s capability to scale and leverage platform play to deliver value-added customer-centric offerings.”
“Darwinbox’s platform has helped customers and partners establish stronger relationships, deliver clearer communication, and implement efficient decision making across a workforce and ecosystem that is getting more diverse and distributed. As a generational shift towards cloud-first platforms enters the HR domain as well, DarwinBox has positioned itself clearly as a leader in this space. We are delighted to continue working with the Darwinbox team as they scale this platform approach to new geographies,” said Pranav Pai, 3One4Capital.