Demonstrating triple digit growth year-on-year, Darwinbox is sprinting towards market leadership in Asia.
With the new investment, the company aims to accelerate its product innovation and is looking to grow the team by 3X in the region to support growth ambitions.
Kuala Lumpur, 25 January 2022 – Darwinbox, Asia’s fastest growing HR tech platform, marks another milestone with a $72 million funding round led by Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) along with participation from existing investors – Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia, Lightspeed, SCB 10X, JGDEV, Endiya Partners and 3One4Capital. The company’s valuation post this round will cross the $1 billion mark and takes the total investment raised thus far by the company to over $110 million. Since the last fund raise from Salesforce Ventures 12 months ago, the company has grown 300% in Southeast Asia. It is expecting higher growth this year owing to enhanced demand for digital tools in the workplace post pandemic.
Founded in late 2015, Darwinbox’s cloud based Human Capital Management (HCM) platform caters to HR needs across the entire employee lifecycle. Their new-age product is powering digital HR for more than 1.5 million employees from 650+ enterprises across the globe. This includes fast growing unicorns (Zilingo, Zalora, Carousell, Tokopedia), leading enterprises (SBS Transit, Armstrong, EM Services, MatchMove, Funding Societies, Mitra Adiperkasa) and large conglomerates (JG Summit Holdings, Indorama, Wilmar and parts of Salim, Djarum and Century pacific groups) in the region. They also serve leading global brands like Nivea, Starbucks, Dominos, T-Systems, AXA, Tokio, Cigna amongst others.
Darwinbox currently stands as the youngest and the only Asian-origin player on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for HCM serving 1000+ employee enterprises. It is also rated the highest (4.8) globally on Gartner’s customer reviews platform, Peer Insights; racing ahead of global giants 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.
“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.” TCV is known for its investments in disruptive tech brands like Netflix, Facebook, Spotify, Airbnb, GoDaddy and Zillow.
“This investment energizes 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 two years with companies having to rethink how they attract, manage and retain their talent” shared, Jayant Paleti, Co-founder, Darwinbox.
The new funding will supercharge Darwinbox’s global expansion plan by allowing the company to accelerate its platform innovation agenda, strengthen its product, engineering and customer success teams along with scaling their go-to-market presence in multiple geographies. The company is set to triple its team within a year aiming to add more than 100+ team members in SEA across its Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Manila and Bangkok offices.
“Investing behind technology to manage talent has become inevitable for organizational success. 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.” added Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix and a Venture Partner at TCV.
2021 represented one of the most entropic and pivotal years in defining the future of work. The world witnessed “remote” and “hybrid” become common words and the “Great Resignation” impacted organizations all over, forcing them to rethink their talent strategy. The result is a 3-5 year forward shift in digital-first thinking for all things talent. Darwinbox is at the heart and center of this movement.
Expanding on the product investments, Chaitanya Peddi, the product head and cofounder of the company shares, “Building for extraordinary agility and delivering stellar employee experience have been critical in defining success for Darwinbox’s customers. We will continue to invest in new and innovative technology to deliver a frictionless experience for the work-from-anywhere workforce.”
“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 integrated HR tech ecosystem”, he added.
