There is a broad trend driving the SaaSification of Asia. I wrote about this recently (Linkedin article).
Building on this trend is Darwinbox, a leading human capital management (HCM) application provider serving the Asia market. The company grew 3x year-over-year over each of the past three years. It added many marquee enterprise customers across India and Southeast Asia, some of whom you can see in the photo above.
We led the Series A financing in May 2017 when Darwinbox had about 50,000 employees on their platform; the platform now has 500,000 employees on it. Kudos to the founders Rohit, Jayant and Chaitanya as well as all their team members at Darwinbox!
We are also super excited about the latest Series B financing of $15 million, led by our friends at Sequoia, with participation from Lightspeed, Endiya and 3one4.
How did Darwinbox achieve this growth? Here are some of the main drivers:
- The company expanded well beyond the initial tech/Internet vertical to include transportation & logistics, pharmaceuticals, banking & financial services, manufacturing, retail and fast-moving consumer goods (or FMCG/CPG).
- The company successfully displaced or won, largely based on its ease-of-use and rapid implementations, against competition from large Western companies (such as SAP, Oracle and Workday) and some older Indian vendors.
- The company built out its modules in a manner that was tuned to Asia-specific requirements, enabling rapid configurability, mobile accessability and support for knowledge workers and blue collar workers in multiple verticals.
- The company built out a full suite of enterprise-grade modules covering human capital management from hiring to payroll to performance management and more.
The future is bright for Darwinbox, as it expands across India and into Southeast Asia and builds out an ecosystem of integrated third-party solutions providers on its platform!
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