Human evolution took millions of years. It took just six years for a homegrown HR tech startup ‘Darwinbox’ to evolve into a $1billion valued unicorn.
The trio behind Darwinbox — Rohit Chennamaneni, Jayant Paleti and Chaitanya Peddi — attribute this ‘evolution’ to three factors.
The coming together of a formidable team where each co-founder brought to the ‘box’ a unique capability, the ‘ah
a moment’ where they realised that the problem they wanted to solve had a huge market potential and finally Hyderabad, the city where all three had near and dear ones assuri ng them of ‘Roti, Kapda aur Makaan’.
This allowed them to focus on their maiden entrepreneurial journey and forego their salaries for a year after starting up.
While Chaitanya and Jayant were colleagues in EY, Jayant and Rohit were friends. That’s how the three connected. What was also common between the three Telugu men was that none of them was keen on settli ng abroad but were confident about building something for the world ground up here in Hyderabad.
They started out with a oneroom setup in a penthouse owned by Jayant’s in-laws. This is also where they met their first investor – Sateesh Andra of Endiya Partners, who decided to lead the company’s first investment round in just two hours.
Before Darwinbox happened, all three were working with large companies. “Whenever we would conduct due diligence, we found that getting data on the company’s financials or CRM would be easy, but HR da ta would be a nightmare. When we would ask for things like cost of salaries or attrition rates, companies would take a lot of time,” Chaitanya said.
Jayant said that the problem was a compelling one to solve. “It is so clear that an organisation’s most critical assets are its people but the tech to manage people at scale has been lagging behind … that’s where we saw a great potential,” he said. This gap in HR data in most companies was intriguing and led them to dig deeper.
They started reaching out to CHROs and CIOs and finally figured out that many companies h ad to deploy around 15-20 separate systems -recruitment, payroll, time management, compensation and onboarding, among others -to manage their human resources which is why collating data took time.
Darwinbox built a solution that offered an HR-tech platform for enterprises to automate day-to-day HR processes in real time and simplify human interactions to build better workplaces.
Rohit recounted that the only thing they worried about in the initial stages is getting caught in a state of limbo where the startup is not able to grow fast or is at that stage where one would not like to shut down the venture.
“The opportunity cost of leaving good jobs was high and so we had to make it work,” Rohit said, adding that while growth was the mantra, non e of the co-founders were fixated on the Unicorn tag and see it just as a milestone in their journey which they never saw as a sprint but as a marathon.
Jayant said one of the initial investors, former Infosys CFO and board member Mohandas Pai gave them the confidence by saying they must build something that caters to the ‘poor employee’, which was music to their ears because that’s exactly the core philosophy of their product.
One of Darwinbox’s key USPs is its focus on integrating mobile with the platform because in India people are expected to be connected 24/7 and hence having HR tools on the mobile made sense.
Rohit added that at every stage, they had their ‘next big customer’ challenge them. “In our early days it was players like PayTm and Delhivery, where we were working with around 1,000 employees and then suddenly, we had to serve players with 10,000 employees…so the scale and complexity increased. But when we came together and met every challenge and punched above our weight, it made us a stronger team. ”
Today, the st artup has over 650 customers with over 1. 5 million users across nearly 90 countries and has already set up offices across 12 locations with 700 employees.
Despite achieving unicorn status, the trio continues to work six days a week and are geared up for the marathon to take Darwinbox around the globe.
The trio behind Darwinbox — Rohit Chennamaneni, Jayant Paleti and Chaitanya Peddi — attribute this ‘evolution’ to three factors.
The coming together of a formidable team where each co-founder brought to the ‘box’ a unique capability, the ‘ah
a moment’ where they realised that the problem they wanted to solve had a huge market potential and finally Hyderabad, the city where all three had near and dear ones assuri ng them of ‘Roti, Kapda aur Makaan’.
This allowed them to focus on their maiden entrepreneurial journey and forego their salaries for a year after starting up.
While Chaitanya and Jayant were colleagues in EY, Jayant and Rohit were friends. That’s how the three connected. What was also common between the three Telugu men was that none of them was keen on settli ng abroad but were confident about building something for the world ground up here in Hyderabad.
They started out with a oneroom setup in a penthouse owned by Jayant’s in-laws. This is also where they met their first investor – Sateesh Andra of Endiya Partners, who decided to lead the company’s first investment round in just two hours.
Before Darwinbox happened, all three were working with large companies. “Whenever we would conduct due diligence, we found that getting data on the company’s financials or CRM would be easy, but HR da ta would be a nightmare. When we would ask for things like cost of salaries or attrition rates, companies would take a lot of time,” Chaitanya said.
Jayant said that the problem was a compelling one to solve. “It is so clear that an organisation’s most critical assets are its people but the tech to manage people at scale has been lagging behind … that’s where we saw a great potential,” he said. This gap in HR data in most companies was intriguing and led them to dig deeper.
They started reaching out to CHROs and CIOs and finally figured out that many companies h ad to deploy around 15-20 separate systems -recruitment, payroll, time management, compensation and onboarding, among others -to manage their human resources which is why collating data took time.
Darwinbox built a solution that offered an HR-tech platform for enterprises to automate day-to-day HR processes in real time and simplify human interactions to build better workplaces.
Rohit recounted that the only thing they worried about in the initial stages is getting caught in a state of limbo where the startup is not able to grow fast or is at that stage where one would not like to shut down the venture.
“The opportunity cost of leaving good jobs was high and so we had to make it work,” Rohit said, adding that while growth was the mantra, non e of the co-founders were fixated on the Unicorn tag and see it just as a milestone in their journey which they never saw as a sprint but as a marathon.
Jayant said one of the initial investors, former Infosys CFO and board member Mohandas Pai gave them the confidence by saying they must build something that caters to the ‘poor employee’, which was music to their ears because that’s exactly the core philosophy of their product.
One of Darwinbox’s key USPs is its focus on integrating mobile with the platform because in India people are expected to be connected 24/7 and hence having HR tools on the mobile made sense.
Rohit added that at every stage, they had their ‘next big customer’ challenge them. “In our early days it was players like PayTm and Delhivery, where we were working with around 1,000 employees and then suddenly, we had to serve players with 10,000 employees…so the scale and complexity increased. But when we came together and met every challenge and punched above our weight, it made us a stronger team. ”
Today, the st artup has over 650 customers with over 1. 5 million users across nearly 90 countries and has already set up offices across 12 locations with 700 employees.
Despite achieving unicorn status, the trio continues to work six days a week and are geared up for the marathon to take Darwinbox around the globe.
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