SINGAPORE and HYDERABAD, India : Darwinbox, Asia’s fastest growing HR tech platform, marks another milestone with a $72MN funding round led by Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) along with participation from existing investors Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia India, Lightspeed India, Endiya Partners, 3One4Capital, JGDEV and SCB 10X. The company’s valuation post this round will cross the $1B mark and takes the total investment raised thus far by the company to over $110Mn. The company has grown 200% since the last fund raise from Salesforces Ventures, exactly 12 months ago.
Founded in late 2015 by Chaitanya Peddi, Jayant Paleti and Rohit Chennamaneni, Darwinbox currently stands as the youngest and the only Asian-origin player on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for enterprise Cloud HCM. It is also rated the highest (4.8) globally on Gartner’s customer reviews platform, Peer Insights, racing ahead of its peers like SAP, Oracle, and Workday – a position they secured on the back of innovative technology, deep understanding of market context, intuitive user experience and great customer traction.
“We get most excited investing behind visionary founders that are fundamentally transforming large industries with a highly resonant product,” said Gopi Vaddi, General Partner, TCV. “I am delighted to back an outstanding team that is doing exactly that in a highly impactful, fast-evolving HR technology space and partner with them on their journey to global HCM leadership.” With a quarter century of investing experience, TCV is known for taking a long-term view on its investments and holds a record of 79 IPOs in their portfolio including the likes of Netflix, Facebook, Expedia, Spotify, Airbnb, GoDaddy and Gitlab.
“This investment energizes our mission to continue building technology that enables organizations to unlock the highest potential of their people. We have done this by building a product that puts employees squarely at the center and crafting meaningful experiences for them. This has especially found resonance in this rapidly evolving world of work over the last 2 years with companies having to rethink how they attract, manage and retain their talent,” shared Jayant Paleti, Co-founder, Darwinbox.
The new funding will supercharge Darwinbox’s global expansion plan by allowing the company to accelerate its platform innovation agenda, strengthen its product, engineering, and customer success teams along with scaling its go-to-market presence in South Asia, SEA, and MENA. The company is expecting the overall team to grow by 100% and is also setting up to launch in the US in 2022.
“Investing behind technology to manage talent has become inevitable for organizational success. Darwinbox’s demonstrated ability to build agile, innovative, and user-friendly solutions along with deep customer centricity has made them a platform of choice for several leading enterprises,” added Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, and a Venture Partner at TCV.
2021 represented one of the most entropic and pivotal years in defining the future of work. The world witnessed “remote” and “hybrid” become common words and the “Great Resignation” impacted organizations all over, forcing them to rethink their talent strategy. The result is a 3-5 year forward shift in digital-first thinking for all things talent.
Darwinbox is at the heart and center of this movement, enabling more than 650 large enterprises to empower and engage their talent with its mobile-first HR lifecycle platform providing Workforce & Talent Management, Employee Engagement, Compensation and Benefits, People Analytics, HR service delivery suites amongst other offerings. More than 1.5 million employees from large conglomerates, fast-growing technology giants and leading global brands like Nivea, Starbucks, Dominos, T-Systems, AXA, Tokio, Cigna, JSW, Adani, Vedanta, Mahindra, Kotak, NSE, Ujjivan, Makemytrip, Swiggy and Tokopedia were able to adapt to the new normal with Darwinbox.
Expanding on the product investments, Chaitanya Peddi, Co-founder and Product Head of the company shares – “Building for extraordinary agility and delivering stellar employee experience have been critical in defining success for Darwinbox’s customers. We will continue to invest in new and innovative technology to deliver a frictionless experience for the work-from-anywhere workforce.”
“In addition, this year, we will be bolstering our platform offering with a host of ancillary services and solutions that enterprises can plug and play to compose an integrated HR tech ecosystem,” he added.
