Darwinbox – Maximize the value of your most critical resource

Though technology is growing at a tremendous speed and automation is the next new big thing, yet for companies and work related aspects, the human touch is very important. Big firms like Deloitte and Amazon, consider their people to be the most important resources.

Though the fact that HR is the most important aspect of any company, it can get quite tiresome to take care of all the processes beginning from recruiting to onboarding to training and then separations. Understanding this hectic added task for companies, 3 Hyderabadis came together to use technology in the best way possible to provide a solution to all HR related tasks.

Darwinbox is a new-age cloud HR platform that takes care of all HR needs across the employee life cycle – Recruitment, Core transactions (Leaves, Attendance, and Directory), Payroll, Employee Movement, Employee Engagement, Talent Management and People Analytics. This cloud startup is an Integrated HR Technology company founded by IIM/IIT/XLRI alumnus with work experiences across top notch companies including McKinsey, Google and EY.

The team

This startup was founded last year by Rohit Chennamaneni, Jayant Prasad Paleti and Chaitanya Peddi.

Rohit worked with McKinsey as an engagement manager and with Google. He is an IIM Lucknow alumnus. Rohit comes with an experience of consulting in Tech and e-commerce space and currently leads the operations at Darwinbox.

Jayant was an investment banker at EY and is an alumnus of IIM Lucknow and IIT Madras. In his experience of advising companies in a merger, he has worked on valuing the core strength of the company, people. Jayant leads the Sales and Marketing efforts for Darwinbox.

Chaitanya also worked with EY HR Consulting and Product development at Verizon. He is an alumnus of XLRI and is the subject expert in HR. He leads the product development at Darwinbox.

The Birth of Darwinbox

While Jayant was working with EY, he was responsible for advising a company for a merger – a large pharma company from Hyderabad was talking to a global company for a takeover and the shock was that such a big pharma company’s founders had no data about their HR function during a board meeting with the global company.

The founders had no idea about the attrition in their own company and claimed that it was less which was probably not the case. Dwelling further on the issue, Jayant realized the fact that there were three different HR softwares in that office made data capture so difficult. That’s when he sensed the opportunity.

This incident happened in November 2014. After this, Jayant called his friends Rohit and Chaitanya to discuss if they could build a platform which can make HR intelligent and strategic rather than a function. They unified every solution – into their product – such as payroll, hiring, candidate sourcing, referral management, employee management with easy documents – for their use – and analytics. While they based themselves in Hyderabad, they also studied the market by keeping their day jobs between 2015 and in January 2016 – when the product was ready – they quit their jobs and started wholly as their own startup. The name was a pun relating to the theory of evolution.

Darwinbox follows the SaaS model (software as a service). They charge a subscription fee per employee per month. The team believes that this “pay-as-you-go” pricing model gives their clients the flexibility to scale-up and grow without having to worry about license restrictions and IT infrastructure limitations.

The modern, integrated and functionally deep HR platform is most appreciated by mid to large size companies who would require the flexibility with no compromise on the functionality. They have built the product to global standards and intend to take it global in future.

Within 9 months of product launch, they already have 50,000+ employees using the platform with marquee clients like Delhivery, Ekart, Sai Life, Swiggy etc.

Why Darwinbox?

There are 4 key aspects in which darwinbox differentiates itself from competition

• Intuitive user experience – The products a working professional uses for personal needs (for example – Uber, Facebook) and business needs at work are at complete dissonance. Enterprise tools lag far behind today’s consumer apps in quality of technology, usability and scalability. At Darwinbox, they want to bridge this new “digital divide” and build products that are as effective as your daily use products. Their powerful, new age enterprise HRMS platform is built with a clear focus on intuitiveness and scalability, with standards of best in class consumer apps
• Integrated Platform – Darwinbox takes care of all employee needs with one login ensuring seamless information flow between multiple modules with no loss in data/errors due to manual intervention
• Intelligent – Analytical frameworks to not just report from available data but focus on decision making frameworks which are data driven. Example – Succession planning, Interviewer effectiveness, Attrition prediction, Promotion effectiveness etc.
• Open Platform – Darwinbox is built in an open API framework which allows it to easily integrate with any system in the future which again will improve the experience of both the employees and administrators alike

In July 2016, this firm successfully raised a round of funding from investors including Mr. Mohandas Pai (through his investment vehicle – 3one4 Capital), Endiya Partners, Startup Xseed and traxcn labs. Currently consisting of five modules, they plan to build more modules and integrate with other enterprise apps to complete the HR ecosystem. Kudos to the trio for coming up with such an amazing idea and converting it into a startup. This idea is indeed revolutionary and will definitely change the way people look at HR.

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