Darwinbox turning ten is not just a startup milestone. It is a signal to the world that an HR product built in India can challenge, and increasingly outpace, the global old guard of HCM – the SAPs, SuccessFactors, Oracles, and Workdays of the world.
Founded in 2015 by four professionals – Chaitanya Peddi, Jayant Paleti, Rohit Chennamaneni, and later joined at founder level by technology leader Vineet Singh – Darwinbox began with more conviction than resources, and more ambition than pedigree.
It started in Hyderabad, far from Silicon Valley and far from traditional enterprise software power centres. A decade later, it is a global HCM platform serving over 1,000 organisations and more than 4 million employees across 130+ countries, with deployments that span large conglomerates, fast-growing tech firms, and iconic consumer brands.
From Hyderabad Startup to Global Unicorn
The inflection point came in January 2022, when Darwinbox raised a 72 million dollar Series D round led by Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia India (now Peak XV), Lightspeed, Endiya Partners, 3one4 Capital, JGDEV, and SCB 10X. The round pushed Darwinbox past the one-billion-dollar valuation mark, making it Hyderabad’s first home-grown unicorn and one of Asia’s most capitalised HR tech platforms.
Unicorn status, however, was not the destination; it was simply a new starting line. The company expanded aggressively across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and beyond, positioning itself as a new-age HCM challenger that could deliver a consumer-grade employee experience at significantly lower total cost of ownership than legacy global vendors.
Taking on the Global Giants
Darwinbox’s core thesis was simple but bold: HR technology, when done right, should unlock outsized value for every enterprise – and legacy HCM vendors were falling short of that leap.
Built as a mobile-first, AI- and ML-powered platform, Darwinbox has consistently focused on:
- End-to-end automation across the employee lifecycle – from hire to retire
- A deeply localised, yet globally scalable product experience
- Practical AI use-cases like sentiment analysis, survey intelligence, bias reduction in screening, and predictive insights for workforce decisions
In 2021, Darwinbox debuted in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites. By 2024, it had moved into the Challenger quadrant for enterprises with more than 1,000 employees – the only vendor to positively shift quadrants that year, and one of the few Asian-born platforms in that space.
For an Indian HR product to be formally benchmarked against Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle HCM Cloud, and others on a global analyst framework is not just a company win; it is a validation of India’s product story.
The Capital Behind the Mission
Behind this acceleration is a deep and increasingly global investor base.
After early backing from Endiya Partners, 3one4 Capital, and JGDEV, Darwinbox progressively attracted some of the world’s most respected technology and growth investors. The 2022 TCV-led round included Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia India / Peak XV, Lightspeed, Endiya Partners, 3one4 Capital, JGDEV, and SCB 10X.
In March 2025, Partners Group and KKR co-led a 140 million dollar round, signalling strong global conviction in Darwinbox’s potential to scale as a category-defining HCM platform. That round also reinforced the continued support of Microsoft, Salesforce Ventures, TCV, Peak XV, Lightspeed and others in the cap table.
Just a few months later, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan’s growth arm, Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG), invested 40 million dollars in Darwinbox to fuel its Agentic AI roadmap and accelerate expansion in North America, where the company has reported 3x annual growth since 2022.
For a SaaS product built in Hyderabad to command this level of global investor confidence in less than a decade is, in itself, a landmark for Indian enterprise software.
Building a Company that Shares Wealth and Ownership
Growth at Darwinbox has not been limited to valuation and geography. The company has also made deliberate moves to create wealth for its employees.
By mid-2025, Darwinbox had completed its third ESOP buyback in four years, returning around 10 million dollars (approximately 86 crore rupees) to 350 employees. It is one of the largest ESOP buyback programs in India’s HR tech space and underscores the founders’ belief that the company’s success must be shared with the people building it.
This is not just financial engineering; it is a cultural statement about ownership, trust, and long-term partnership with talent.
From India to the World: A HR Product Story with Global Ambition
The story of Darwinbox also mirrors the story of India’s product ecosystem.
A decade ago, the idea that an Indian HR platform could directly compete with global incumbents and win Tier-1 enterprise mandates across Asia, the Middle East, and North America would have sounded ambitious at best. Today, Darwinbox is not just competing; it is winning multi-country rollouts with clients ranging from conglomerates like Adani and Mahindra to digital-native firms like Swiggy, Tokopedia, and Apollo.io.
The inauguration of its global headquarters in Hyderabad in 2022 was symbolic – a global HCM challenger choosing to anchor its leadership and innovation engine in India, while building out hubs across other regions.
Darwinbox’s first decade proves a powerful thesis: that world-class HR products can be imagined, engineered, and scaled from India – and that they can go toe-to-toe with the most established vendors in the world.
The next decade is about something bigger:
Pushing the frontier of AI-driven employee experience, building deeper global ecosystems with partners like Microsoft, and helping enterprises move beyond “systems of record” to truly intelligent “systems of engagement” and “systems of impact”.
As Darwinbox steps into its second decade, it carries with it the belief of thousands of customers, the conviction of some of the world’s finest investors, and the energy of teams who have chosen to build a global product story from India for the world.
This is not just ten years of a company.
This is ten years of an idea: that HR tech from India can shape how the world works.
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