Darwinbox, an Indian startup building a SaaS platform for hiring, onboarding and employee administration, has raised $140 million to take on the likes of Rippling and Deel as it seeks to expand internationally, especially in the U.S.
The funding is being co-led by KKR and Partners Group, and is a mix of primary and secondary share sales, with several unnamed investors selling parts of their stakes. Darwinbox’s investor list includes the likes of Microsoft, Salesforce, Sequoia, TCV, Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India) and Lightspeed.
Darwinbox, which has now raised around $270 million in total, did not respond to questions on its valuation in this latest round except to confirm it is an up-round. When the news leaked out last week in the local press, the company’s price tag was pegged at $950 million.
In 2022, Darwinbox raised funding at a valuation of over $1 billion.
For some context, two of the bigger startups in the HR-tech space — Deel and Rippling — are both valued around $12 billion to $13 billion. Darwinbox’s other competitors include providers of point solutions as well as large, older incumbents like SAP, Oracle and Workday, among dozens of other companies.
Darwinbox may be smaller than some of its rivals, but it’s a business worth watching for a few reasons.
For starters, it’s one of the wave of home-grown enterprise startups that have emerged from India and Southeast Asia in the last several years as the region’s technology ecosystem matures and expands beyond e-commerce.
An investor once described the trend to us as “the SaaS-ification of Asia.” When you combine that with the enormous amounts of money flowing in the region, and its collective population, it’s clearly a region one should be looking to for the next big thing in tech.
The second reason is that this is a notable example of a company from India that has managed to transcend its region and gain some traction in the coveted U.S. market.
Darwinbox says it has more than 1,000 enterprise customers and provides tools to manage employee administration for more than 3 million people in total. It targets mid-market companies with 3,000 employees or more.
About 60% of its revenue now comes from outside of India, the company said. Jayant Paleti, who founded the company with Rohit Chennamaneni and Chaitanya Peddi, told TechCrunch that the U.S. is the company’s fastest-growing market. Paleti said he’s relocated to the U.S., in Texas, to square up to the opportunity there.
The third reason is that Darwinbox takes an all-in-one, ambitious approach to HR.
As Paleti described it, HR is one of the oldest enterprise software categories. So while that means there is a lot of legacy junk with much room for improvement, it also means a lot of systems are deeply ingrained. Most of the startup’s sales work involves both persuading users that what they have is not good enough as well as convincing them that what Darwinbox has built is better.
“When we started in 2015, it almost felt overwhelming,” he said. “Here we were, a small band of three people in a corner of Asia, and we wanted to build this global company that will take on these legacy players.”
That said, here’s one amusing measure of how Darwinbox has shaken up the playing field: When I recently Googled Darwinbox, the first result I got was the company name, but, in fact, the link pointed to one of its competitors, Sage. A couple of other competitors, including Oyster, were also clearly buying placements against searches for Darwinbox.
While the wider enterprise IT industry has waxed and waned around whether point solutions or platforms are the best option for end users, the startup’s focus has so far remained pretty singular. It has aimed to build an end-to-end platform that can be used not just to source and manage recruiting, but also to later on onboard employees, manage their administration throughout their period of employment (expenses, vacation and time worked, payroll, etc.), and beyond.
Paleti said the next stage of the product will likely involve significantly more AI, which he thinks the company is well-positioned to execute because of its platform approach: it can power services holistically.
“We are the system of record for HR,” he said.
Partners Group, one of the two lead investors in this round, is taking a $75 million stake in the company with this deal, Cyrus Driver, its MD for private equity, told TechCrunch.
Driver said his firm has been wanting to invest for a couple of years, but only got the opportunity with this latest round. “We see them as one of a handful of disruptors in the bigger space displacing global majors,” he said, noting that the startup’s ability to localize its product as it has grown has also been a standout feature.
“We did a lot of due diligence, and they have a conviction on the right to win.”
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