Darwinbox fourth unicorn of 2022 after $72 mn fundraise

HR tech startup, Darwinbox, headquartered in Hyderabad has raised $72 million in a fresh funding round valuing the company at over $1 billion. This was a Series D round led by Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), which is known for backing Netflix, Spotify, Meta earlier. The round also saw the participation from the existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital India, Salesforce Ventures, 3One4 Capital, Endiya Partners, and SCB 10X. With this the cumulative funds raise by the SaaS firm now stands at $110 million. The investment comes at a time when the virtual onboarding, employee engagement of companies has taken a remote mode with a majority of the enterprises adopting a hybrid model. Last year Darwin box raised $15 million led by Salesforce Ventures. The company said that the proceeds will be utilised to drive its global expansion, accelerate platform innovation and ramp up its product, engineering, and customer-success teams as it seeks to boost its presence in South Asia, Southeast Asia, as well as Middle East and North Africa. The company claims to have grown 200 per cent since the last fund raise from Salesforces Ventures, exactly 12 months ago. Founded in late 2015 by Chaitanya Peddi, Jayant Paleti and Rohit Chennamaneni, Darwinbox currently stands as the youngest and the only Asian-origin player on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for enterprise Cloud HCM. It is also rated the highest (4.8) globally on Gartner’s customer reviews platform, Peer Insights, racing ahead of its peers like SAP, Oracle, and Workday – a position they secured on the back of innovative technology, deep understanding of market context, intuitive user experience and great customer traction. “This investment energises our mission to continue building technology that enables organizations to unlock the highest potential of their people. We have done this by building a product that puts employees squarely at the center and crafting meaningful experiences for them. This has especially found resonance in this rapidly evolving world of work over the last 2 years with companies having to rethink how they attract, manage and retain their talent,” Jayant Paleti, co-founder, Darwinbox said. "We get most excited investing behind visionary founders that are fundamentally transforming large industries with a highly resonant product,” said Gopi Vaddi, General Partner, TCV. “I am delighted to back an outstanding team that is doing exactly that in a highly impactful, fast-evolving HR technology space and partner with them on their journey to global HCM leadership.” With a quarter century of investing experience, TCV is known for taking a long-term view on its investments and holds a record of 79 IPOs in their portfolio including the likes of Netflix, Facebook, Expedia, Spotify, Airbnb, GoDaddy and Gitlab,” Vaddi added.