Sequoia leads $15m round for India's Darwinbox

Existing backers Lightspeed India Partners, Endiya Partners, and 3one4 Capital also contributed. It follows a $4 million Series A in 2017 that featured StartupXseed Ventures. The company claims that its customer base increased fivefold and that revenue grew by 900% between the two rounds.

Darwinbox positions itself as an HR services provider that caters to enterprises’ needs across the employee lifecycle, including hiring and retirement. It has some 200 customers with more than 500,000 employees in 50 countries, including Kotak Mahindra Bank, Times Internet, and private equity-backed players such as financial technology provider Paytm and food delivery app Swiggy.

“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,” Dev Khare, a partner at Lightspeed, said in a statement. “Darwinbox understands and delivers on this need better than global providers to lead the market in enterprise-grade human capital management solutions.”

Rohit Chennamaneni, co-founder of Darwinbox, estimates Asia’s HR technology market is worth $9 billion. New opportunities are emerging in the space as a result of rising mobile phone use, which in turn facilitates new ways of organizing teams and engaging employees. The trend is also leading to increased diversity and distribution of workforces, which has necessitated new internal communication strategies and more efficient decision-making in areas such as recruitment, onboarding, expense management, payroll, performance management, and people analytics.

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