Plans to use the funding for product innovation and market expansion.
Technology in HR is on an upward trail and to boost it further, investors are showing great interest in the domain. American venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with a few others, just concluded a $4 million series A funding for home-grown enterprise Human Resource Management (HRMS) platform, Darwinbox.
Lightspeed India Partners led the round along with participation from Darwinbox’s existing investors Endiya Partners, Mohandas Pai’s 3one4 Capital and Startupxseed Ventures. The company had raised its pre-series A round less than a year ago.
Jayant Paleti, co-founder, Darwinbox, says, “There is a strong, ever increasing demand for a modern technology suite that will address the need for a system that’s not just for recordkeeping but a system of intelligence that helps propel the human resource agenda. With this capital raise, Darwinbox will continue to expand its core technology, product and go-to-market capability across India and internationally.”
Darwinbox’s cloud-based end-to-end HRMS platform automates HR processes across the entire employee lifecycle – managing recruitment, onboarding, core HR, time and attendance, expense management, payroll, employee engagement, performance management and people analytics. It claims an easy-to-use interface with high degree of configurability to suit local enterprise context.
In line with that, Chaitanya Peddi, co-founder and product head, Darwinbox, says, “We have built an integrated, functionally deep and flexible application suite capable of handling organizations of all sizes and complexities. We will continue to invest in areas such as Big Data, machine learning coupled with latest research in HRM and psychology to maximize the value we offer to our clients while staying relevant and ahead of the competition.”
In the last one year, the company has covered 50+ clients and 100,000+ employees across verticals such as technology, pharma, healthcare and logistics. The company’s marquee clients include Paytm, Nivea, Godrej CDPL, Delhivery, Sai Life Sciences, Swiggy and Hetero Pharma. Darwinbox operates on a SaaS model which allows companies to only pay as they use.
Darwinbox’s product is targeted at mid to large sized enterprises, where it typically competes with the likes of SAP, Successfactors and Oracle Fusion. Darwinbox differentiates itself from competition through its easy-to-use interface, functional depth, faster implementation cycles and unique new-age features (e-onboarding, merit planning, continuous feedback, performance journals, insightful analytics).
“At all sizes and in all industries, businesses succeed when their employees and managers are engaged for maximum productivity and potential. As a result, human capital management software is core to the success of every business,” said Dev Khare, partner, Lightspeed India Partners Advisors.
The founders Jayant Paleti, Rohit Chennamaneni and Chaitanya Peddi are IIT/IIM/XLRI alumni and had worked across companies such as Mckinsey, Google, EY and Deloitte before founding Darwinbox.