Salesforce Ventures made its first Indian investment, by leading a $15 million funding round in Hyderabad-based HR technology platform Darwinbox, which was founded in 2015 by Chaitanya Peddi, Jayant Paleti, and Rohit Chennamaneni. Darwinbox enables organizations to automate their entire employee timeline, ultimately helping enterprises to empower, engage, and elevate the potential of their workforce through its hire-to-retire Human Capital Management (HCM) platform.
Salesforce Ventures is known to invest in big global start-ups like video conferencing platform Zoom and cloud storage provider Dropbox. And the revenue growth recorded by Darwinbox during these past months of the lockdown has more or less established the company in the Asia-Pacific regions as one of the leading HR automation platforms. Darwinbox notably registered a 200% revenue boost in the last few months of 2020.
Other investors in the company include Sequoia Capital India, LightSpeed India Partners, 3one4 Capital, Endiya Partners, and iLabs Capital, among a few others. Darwinbox also raised capital in September 2019, in a $15 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital. The startup claims that its revenue has already grown 300% since its last funding round.
Currently, the company provides solutions to over 500 companies globally, including the Adani, Mahindra, Kotak, TVS, Arvind, NSE, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank, Bharti AXA, Dr. Reddy’s, Nivea, Puma, T-Systems, Swiggy, Bigbasket, and Delhivery. Its services are used by more than 1 million employees in over 60 countries.
Salesforce India, which had appointed former SBI chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya as its Chairperson and CEO, marks this investment as a first for Salesforce Ventures in India.
"India is home to one of the world's youngest populations, and by 2050, it is expected to account for over 18% of the global working-age population. This makes technology platforms like Darwinbox, which focuses on workforces, incredibly important. I'm proud that Salesforce is supporting Darwinbox on their journey as they continue to grow and innovate in this space,” said Bhattacharya in a statement. So, while this may be Salesforce’s first investment in India, it seems as though it certainly won’t be its last.
