Darwinbox raises USD 15 Mn to expand Asian presence

HR tech platform Darwinbox has raised USD 15 million in series B led by Sequoia Capital, taking its total investment tab to USD 20 million. 3one4 Capital, Lightspeed Ventures and Endiya Partners participated in the round. The proceeds will be used to expand into Southeast Asia, hire talents and to leverage R&D.

“Towards the end of 2018, we decided to sell our services outside of India, and Southeast Asia was the first geography we zeroed in on.We now have six clients in the region, ranging from mid to large enterprises,” Jayant Paleti, co-founder of Darwinbox, told Economic Times.

Darwinbox provides cloud-based workforce management and analytics solutions for businesses. The Hyderbabad-based SaaS startup’s clientele include Arvind Group, Kalyani Group, Tata Group, Mahindra Group and Adani Group.

“The SaaS-ification (SaaS stands for Software as a Service) of Asia is a trend that we have been seeing for a couple of years and have made a few investments around this theme. Human capital management is typically one of the first categories that goes to the Cloud in an economy that’s adopting SaaS,” Dev Khera, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, told Economic Times.

Darwinbox's cloud-based solution helps organisations engage and nurture their most important asset- human capital, across its entire life-cycle from hire to retire (recruitment, onboarding, leaves, attendance, payroll, employee engagement, rewards and recognition, talent management, learning management, people analytics and separation) on one platform, according to CrunchBase.

Darwinbox’s competitors include sumHR, Greytip Software, and ZingHR.