India's coolest start-ups: Here's how Darwinbox became a leading HRTech platform

Darwinbox

(HRtech)

Key People: Chaitanya Peddi, Co-founder & Product Head; Jayant Paleti, Co-founder; Rohit Chennamaneni, Co-founder

Key investors: TCV, Salesforce Ventures, Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India), Lightspeed India, Endiya, 3One4Capital

Funding: Latest was the Series-D fundraise of $72 million in January 2022, which took its total funding so far to around $120 million

What makes it cool: This unicorn start-up is taking on legacy multibillion dollar MNC players such as SAP and Oracle

“A founder has to be everything. We have to wear multiple hats in a day,” says Darwinbox Co-founder Jayant Paleti. He would know. The Hyderabad-based HRtech start-up is taking on legacy multibillion dollar players such as SAP and Oracle by providing cloud-based human resources management software for 2.2 million employees across 850-odd companies such as Vedanta, L&T Metro Rail, Adani Wilmar, Swiggy, Zepto and more. Set up in 2015 by three friends, Paleti, Chaitanya Peddi and Rohit Chennamaneni, it became a unicorn in 2022—the 84th Indian start-up to be valued over a billion dollars. The founders have placed tremendous emphasis on having a good, reliable team with a high level of agency and initiative. “There is so much happening in terms of hiring, new markets, existing clients, operations at different scales—and it’s almost always urgent. You need to switch seamlessly to what is the need of the moment, and that is tough,” says Paleti.

This team has expanded to 1,100-plus employees across 11 offices in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Dubai, India, North America, the UK and more. The start-up is also scaling up in all markets they are present in. It turned in `224 crore revenue from operations in FY23, but like most, it is yet to see profits. Paleti says they know that they have to scale up globally in a way that their processes and operations can sustain the scale.