Salesforce Inc. has invested $15 million in the Indian HR technology platform, Darwinbox, through its investment branch Salesforce Ventures. This is the first time that Salesforce is investing in an Indian venture.
Existing investors of Salesforce Ventures include Lightspeed India and Sequoia Capital has also participated in the round, thus bringing the five-year-old startup’s rise to nearly $35 million. The Indian startup, headquartered in Hyderabad, is thinking further expanding in the country and the Southeast Asian markets.
Alex Kayyal, partner and head, international, Salesforce Ventures stated that cloud adoption in Asia is growing at a great pace and the pandemic has further helped amplify the importance of going digital. Alex also stated that Darwinbox is delivering alteration for Asia’s leading enterprises and is the platform of choice. The HR platform has surged in adopting during the pandemic when organizations were ensuring business continuity while ensuring and managing the safety of the remote workforce.
Darwinbox, founded in 2015 by Chaitanya Pedddia, Jayant Paleti, and Rohit Chennamaneni, has competed with cloud platforms like SAP and Oracle. Also, several enterprises are abandoning the legacy offerings in the favour of the modern and agile human capital management platform which helps people to stay ahead of the change.
The company will work hand-in-hand with Salesforce to maximize the value for the customers while continuing to build out the product stack and improve the global expansion. Jayant Paleti even commented that they want to heavily invest in deep tech and product by building out data analytics capabilities. For this, they will be leaning on Salesforce to maximize the value for the clients.
