Lightspeed leads $4m Series A for India's Darwinbox

Existing investors Endiya Partners, 3one4 Capital and StartupXseed Ventures also participated. It follows a seed round of undisclosed size last year that also included a contribution from technology incubator TracxnLabs. The new capital will be applied to product innovation and market expansion.

"HR technology is leading the software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud adoption, which has a steady growth of over 30% year-on-year in India,” Sateesh Andra, managing director at Endiya, said in a statement. “In this rapidly growing market, Darwinbox expertly combines local customer knowledge with global standards in design, engineering and product marketing which gives them an advantage in Indian SaaS business when competing with global players."

Darwinbox uses a cloud-based end-to-end platform to automate HR processes across the employee lifecycle, including managing recruitment, onboarding, core HR, time and attendance, expense management, payroll, employee engagement, performance management and people analytics. It claims to have added more than 50 companies and some 100,000 employees to is user base in the past year. Clients include Paytm, Delhivery, and Swiggy.

Indian HR services has been an active area for venture capital.  Earlier this year, Sequoia Capital India led a $10 million round for recruitment platform operator Belong and Multiples Alternative Asset Management acquired a controlling stake in PeopleStrong.

Meanwhile, recruitment companies Kelly Services India and Temp Holdings have launched a $10 million VC fund that targets HR-focused start-ups. This coincided with a $15 million exit from staffing service company TeamLease by ICICI Venture as well as separate investments in classifieds platforms Hiree and Quikr.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Support services
• Technology
• Early-stage
• India
• TMT
• Lightspeed Venture Partners