Following its latest funding round of $72 million, Darwinbox, the Asia-born HR tech platform, has achieved unicorn status with its valuation now crossing the $1bn mark and taking the total investment raised by the company to over $110mn.
The new funding will accelerate Darwinbox’s plans to scale market presence in MENA, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. With its regional office based in Dubai’s DIFC, the company aims to invest aggressively and grow its team in the UAE.
“The Middle East is a priority market for us and our commitment to the region is very high. This region will be our fastest growing in the next two years,” Jayant Paleti, co-founder at Darwinbox told Arabian Business.
“The new funding will majorly be deployed to accelerate growth and product innovation tailored for MENA. Along with strengthening our team on the ground and opening new offices in the GCC, we will build strategic partner networks in the region to complement our technology offering with transformation advisory,” he added that Darwinbox is “keen to work with stakeholders from the region including investors whose vision aligns with ours”.
Darwinbox is staging the opening of its next GCC office in Saudi Arabia and will be launching its Arabic mobile app specifically tailored for MENA employees later this year.
“Markets across the Middle East, especially in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, have some of the world’s highest smartphone penetration rates and a growing young population that’s digital-savvy,” said Paleti.
“The vast majority of the workforce in the region are employed by sectors like retail, real estate, infrastructure, healthcare and others that involve a distributed work setup demanding agile and on-the-go technology – an area that Darwinbox solves supremely well compared to global solutions. In addition, the pandemic was a significant inflection point for Middle Eastern enterprises, with a majority adopting remote and hybrid work practices. We are confident and extremely positive about growing 400 percent this year in the Middle East region,” he explained.
The latest fundraising round was led by the US-based Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) with participation from Darwinbox’s existing strategic investors Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Lightspeed Ventures.
“At Darwinbox, the focus is always to seek strategic investment and not just capital. We believe in partnering with investors who add to the team’s expertise in terms of scaling the company in the right direction. Even in our last round of investment, we partnered with the world’s largest cloud tech company, Salesforce, primarily to learn from the knowledge and expertise they have that can, in turn, help us deliver higher value for our customers,” explained Paleti.
“In the current round, we are excited to partner with TCV, renowned for its long-term view on investments. With 79 IPOs in their portfolio, TCV has been helping fast-growing start-ups scale into sustainable and long-lasting technology brands. The likes of Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, Expedia, GoDaddy are all part of TCV’s portfolio. This very expertise is going to be a major value-add in the next leg of our journey to global HCM leadership,” he continued.
The company has grown 200 percent since the last fundraise from Salesforces Ventures 12 months ago and has added over 700,000 users on the platform in that period.
Founded in 2015, Darwinbox’s cloud-based human capital management (HCM) platform caters to private and public sector HR needs across the employee lifecycle. Darwinbox supports global brands like Nivea, Starbucks, Sephora, Zara, and AXA, along with Lulu Group, Aramex, and Mobily Infotech in the region.
Built with advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities, Darwinbox HCM has innovations such as Voicebot for HR, facial recognition-based touchless attendance, and several other features to manage the post-pandemic workplace.
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