The round also saw participation from existing investors Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia India, Lightspeed India, Endiya Partners, 3One4Capital, JGDEV and SCB10X.
By Salman SH
Darwinbox, an HR tech platform, on Tuesday raised $72 million in fresh funding at a billion-dollar valuation making it the third start-up to turn unicorn this year. The round was led by growth equity provider Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), which had earlier backed multi-billions dollar firms, including Netflix, Spotify and Electronic Arts.
The round also saw participation from existing investors Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia India, Lightspeed India, Endiya Partners, 3One4Capital, JGDEV and SCB10X. The current round takes the total investment in the company to over $110 million.
Darwinbox is currently the 84th unicorn and the 12th start-up in the SaaS market to reach the billion-dollar valuation mark alongside firms like MindTickle, BrowserStack, Chargebee and others. In this year, Mumbai-based SaaS firm Fractal Analytics was the first start-up to gain the unicorn status in 2022.
DarwinBox, which was founded in late 2015 by Chaitanya Peddi, Jayant Paleti, and Rohit Chennamaneni, currently claims to have grown its revenue by 200% since the last fundraise from Salesforces Ventures a year ago and has added more than 700,000 users on the platform in the same period.
The new funding will help Darwinbox in global expansion, strengthen its product, engineering and customer success teams along with scaling its go-to-market presence in South Asia, SEA and MENA. The company is expecting its headcount to grow by 100% and is also set to launch in the US in 2022.
Darwinbox currently counts more than 650 large enterprises as its clientele base, including Nivea, T-Systems, Starbucks, Dominos, AXA, Tokio, Cigna, MakeMyTrip, among others, to have joined its platform to date. It offers SaaS-based solutions for human resources lifecycle management, workforce and talent management, employee engagement, compensation and benefits, people analytics, and other HR service deliveries.
“Investing behind technology to manage talent has become inevitable for organisational success,” said Jessica Neal, former chief talent officer at Netflix, and a venture partner at TCV in a statement. “Darwinbox’s demonstrated ability to build agile, innovative, and user-friendly solutions along with deep customer centricity has made them a platform of choice for several leading enterprises,” she added.
On expanding product investments, Chaitanya Peddi, co-founder and product head of Darwinbox, said that the start-up will continue to invest in new and innovative technology to deliver a better experience for those who have chosen the work-from-anywhere model.
“In addition, this year, we will be bolstering our platform offering with a host of ancillary services and solutions that enterprises can plug and play to compose an extensible and integrated HR tech ecosystem,” added Peddi.
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