Salesforce Ventures Leads $15M Investment in Indian HR Startup Darwinbox
Indian HR tech startup Darwinbox raises $15 million in a Series C round led by Salesforce Ventures to expand its cloud-based platform across Asia.
Salesforce Ventures leads a $15 million Series C investment round in Darwinbox, a cloud-based human resource management startup based in Hyderabad. Existing investors Lightspeed India and Sequoia Capital India also participate in this rare Asian investment by the American enterprise giant, bringing the five-year-old startup's total funding to approximately $35 million.
Darwinbox currently serves over 500 firms across 60 nations, providing its HR platform to more than a million employees. The startup handles the entire employee lifecycle from hiring to retiring, offering features such as onboarding, performance monitoring, attrition tracking, and an AI assistant for administrative tasks. Co-founder Chaitanya Peddi describes the investment from Salesforce as a major validation for the growing company.
This funding round caps off a highly successful year for the startup despite early pandemic challenges, with its revenue ballooning by 300% since late 2019. Darwinbox now ranks just behind SAP and Oracle in terms of HR tech revenue in India, and it plans to use the new capital to further expand its presence in India and Southeast Asian markets.