Darwinbox, a global HR-Tech startup that empowers enterprises to better manage their talent with new-age employee experiences and disruptive AI-powered technology, has raised $5 million in its Series D extension round from State Bank of India (SBI), marking its first fundraised in 2023.
According to the company’s regulatory filing with the Registrar of Companies (RoC) shows, the board at Darwinbox has passed a special resolution to issue 14,523 Series D3 compulsory convertible preference shares (CCPS) at an issue price of Rs 28,105 per share to State Bank of India (SBI) in a consideration of Rs 40.82 crore or around $5 million.
With the new fundraising, the Hyderabad-based company plans to expand its capital expenditure, marketing, and general corporate purposes. It is also looking to go public in the next three years, the regulatory filing further mentioned.
Co-founded by Chaitanya Peddi, Jayant Paleti, and Rohit Chennamaneni in 2015, Darwinbox is a cloud-based integrated HR technology product that covers recruitment, payroll, employee engagement, talent management, and people analytics across the employee life cycle. It claims to be the third-largest SaaS-based HRtech firm after SAP and Oracle. The company’s endeavour is to empower its customers to engage more meaningfully with their colleagues across levels, and take more informed decisions.
While Darwinbox is yet to disclose its financials for FY22, it registered 93% growth in its revenue from operations to Rs 53.3 crore in FY21. As per the annual financial statement with the RoC, its losses surged around 36% to Rs 8.7 crore during the same period.
Darwinbox believes in crediting every valid point no matter how young the source may be. It values consistent high performance and expects everyone to be the best version of themselves. The platform also claims to have serviced over 2 million employees across 700 plus organizations and 90 countries.
In the last one year, it has strengthened its senior management team as it looks to scale to go public. A couple of days ago, Darwinbox appointed Panuwat Benrohman as the managing director and country head for Thailand. Arun Dhaka joined the HR tech firm’s executive leadership team as Vice President of Sales – Asia Pacific & Japan a month ago. In May last year, ex-Microsoft leader Gautam Goenka joined the company as Senior Vice President, Engineering.
The firm was looking to hire 500 more employees globally over the next one year or so. It inaugurated its new global headquarters in Hyderabad recently, a media report said in November 2022. It has close to 1,000 employees currently.
A year ago, Darwinbox raised $72 million in its Series D round led by Technology Crossover Ventures with participation from existing investors including Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia Capital India, Lightspeed India, Endiya Partners, JGDEV, 3One4Capital and SCB 10x and achieved unicorn status. The HR-tech platform had raised $4 million from Microsoft Corporation in November last year. The startup’s latest funding brings its total raised over $115 million so far.
