Darwinbox

Darwinbox is a human capital management (HCM) software company founded in 2015 in Hyderabad by Jayant Paleti, Rohit Chennamaneni and Chaitanya Peddi. It sells a cloud HR platform that covers the full employee lifecycle, and its main customers are large and mid-sized enterprises.

The platform includes core HR, recruitment, onboarding, leave and attendance, payroll, performance and goal management, learning, engagement surveys, expense management and HR analytics, all accessible through a mobile app. The company also markets AI features for employee self-service and workflow automation. It started in India and has since expanded into Southeast Asia, the Middle East and other markets. Darwinbox runs its product and engineering operations mainly from Hyderabad, and it has sales and support teams in other Indian cities and abroad.

Darwinbox sells mainly through direct enterprise sales. It does not publish prices, which are quoted per engagement based on headcount and the modules selected. Its publicly named customers include large Indian groups such as JSW, Adani, Mahindra, Vedanta and Kotak, as well as consumer internet companies such as Swiggy and bigbasket. Its customers range from companies with a few hundred employees to groups with more than a hundred thousand, and typical deployments cover several business units, locations and pay structures.

The company has raised several funding rounds. Its investors include Endiya Partners (an early backer), Lightspeed, Peak XV Partners, Salesforce Ventures and TCV. It passed a US$1 billion valuation in 2022 after a US$72 million round, and total funding reported in the press is close to US$300 million. Implementations are usually run by Darwinbox's own teams, and the platform integrates with common ERP, finance and identity systems.