Salesforce is not known to have an interest in Asian startups. Yet, the American enterprise giant surprised the industry with a disruptive move into the SAP and Oracle territory.
Highlights:
- In a strategic deal, Salesforce ventures chipped $15 million into Darwinbox, an HR technology platform that manages end-to-end business operations.
- The funding comes at an opportune time when the startup is looking to expand its presence in Southeast Asia and West Asia.
- After SAP and Oracle, Darwinbox is the third-largest HR cloud in India.
- The company aims to become a leader in the space in the next two years.
- Darwinbox is also expanding presence across markets such as Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia.
Welcoming the digital boss in the industry, Salesforce ventures make its first investment in India through a Cloud Startup, Darwinbox. It is a Hyderabad-based startup, which extends web-based benefits related to administration solutions for businesses of all sizes.
Reducing the digital divide in India, Darwinbox offers services that can solve work challenges and help businesses meet long-term goals.
Why Darwinbox: First Glimpse
Founded in 2015 by Chaitanya Peddi, Jayant Paleti, and Rohit Chennamaneni, Darwinbox has enabled organizations to automate their entire employee timeline, allowing enterprises to empower, engage, and elevate the potential of their workforce. Making itself a household name, top companies of the sector such as Adani, Mahindra, Kotak, TVS, National Stock Exchange, Swiggy and Bigbasket use Darwinbox’s HR platform.
Darwinbox is the third-largest HR cloud in India, after SAP and Oracle.
This year, the company raised funding through Series C led by Salesforce Ventures, which is a venture arm of the American enterprise giant. As this is one of Salesforce Ventures’ rare investments in Asia, all the earlier investors including Lightspeed India and Sequoia Capital India participated in the round. This has led the startup to raise about $35 million to date.
Watch: How Darwinbox eases business with AI and machine learning
Employee-First Experience, inspired by Salesforce
Darwinbox offers professional services, rewards the engager, manages the retirement planner, and boosts the spendings account manager, among other services. This state-of-the-art tech tool, Darwinbox is a new-age enterprise-ready platform. Their Human Capital Management (HCM) service lets the business automate day-to-day HR processes. With their technology, they simplify human interactions and keep a track of all the deliverables. The company claims to make work more effective, letting the workplace achieve their strategic HR goals faster and smarter. Over 500 brands globally that use Darwinbox to manage their hiring process and talent acquisition.
Darwinbox has always looked up to Salesforce for their professional work as inspiration, getting an investment from the company was like a morale booster to do more and better. With the latest investment, the company aims to expand through Salesforce’s distribution network tapping new, profitable regions.
Digitalisation: From Hiring to Retiring
The company is aimed at clients working remotely. In this section, Darwinbox has witnessed a surge in their new customer base. To put it simply, the tools access all the information. Be it from the team, colleagues, and new organizations on the board, or the actions to be taken. It lets users customize the software as per company needs. It also helps maintain an efficient employee directory.
Darwinbox is the choice HR software for over 500 brands globally.
Regarding payroll, and onboarding or exit management, the software maintains an internal social network, which posts messages to specific groups, conducts polls and creates calendar events as a reminder. With time, the Darwinbox team is continuously disrupting the ever-evolving industry, making it competitive and inclusive. Their prime area of focus investment is at the sophisticated tools, people, processes and partners that allow them to expand and bring value to the system.
