Following the company’s latest funding round of USD72 million in the MENA region, Darwinbox Co-founder Jayant Paleti spoke with TECHx about the inspiration for the birth of Darwinbox, emerging technologies, and the company’s future roadmap. Continue reading to find out more…
Paleti: I started Darwinbox in late 2015 with two of my other co-founders – Rohit Chennamaneni, and Chaitanya Peddi.
Prior to Darwinbox, I was an investment banker at EY, managing Mergers and Acquisitions, and private equity. In one such merger that I was leading, I happened to observe a gap. It struck me that business leaders often had no idea about the most fundamental metrics like employee headcount and attrition. To add to the problem there was no way for them to even find this data easily because there was no single source of truth in the organization, or the data and processes were scattered in disjoint systems leading to operational inefficiency.
This followed by more market research made it very clear that global HCM leaders cannot solve for enterprises of the modern day – to manage highly diverse workforces, one needs to stay agile and needs a strong focus on delivering great experiences. This called for a system that needed to be extremely configurable, extensible and connected.
We also strongly believe people are the greatest competitive advantage for any organization and a powerful emphasis on enabling their workforce will be a priority for any organization that is looking to thrive in the changing reality of work. And hence the journey of Darwinbox started.
Paleti: The pandemic shed light on and accelerated a few inevitable realities of the changing reality of work. Digitization was no longer a Wishlist item but table stakes. HRs came into the spotlight solving some of the most important and business critical problem statements. Problems like employee experience, hybrid work, talent entropy, and more.
We happened to be at a great vantage point when all this change was happening – we managed to put control into HR’s hands and watched them as they tackled solving for remote work when the first lockdowns hit and then consistently evolving their systems to prepare for hybrid work, employee happiness, engagement and productivity.
Watching this closely with over 650 enterprises across 90+ countries helped us learn a lot. Businesses have realized the importance of focusing on more strategic areas like talent management, rewarding and recognizing their employees in a fully remote model, engaging their workforce through digital channels, driving company culture through technology, and more. This manifests in the form of scaling investments that we’re seeing in these areas. Hence, organizations, irrespective of the industry, are actively bettering the infrastructure they need to keep their talent resource engaged and productive. HR Tech is a crucial driver of the same.
Paleti: Darwinbox was born digital. Right from inception, we have invested in new age and cutting-edge technologies for robust architecture, rapid scaling, high availability, security ops framework, accurate facial recognition, and other use cases.
Darwinbox is built on an independently managed microservices architecture that is seamlessly connected via internal APIs to form an integrated application. It means that all modules from hire-to-retire (and any other vertical or horizontal use case) can be independently deployed and managed without affecting each other.
Apart from this, one of the earlier, most distinguished investments we made was building Darwinbox using Graph DB. Graph DB helps to find correlations between team members and their respective performance metrics. It also ensures the mapping of skills required for an open job position and talent assessment.
Darwinbox is moving in the direction where it is democratizing how organizations can ensure a better EX by letting any third-party system connect with the client’s existing ecosystem delivering a true employee delight, and hyper-personalize at scale.
Paleti: We started this journey solving for Asian enterprises – known for having some of the most diverse set of requirements – where you most often find a large conglomerate with multiple business entities, diverse types of workforces which, by the way, have limited tech savviness and is very mobile heavy.
We quickly understood that we needed a system that is extremely configurable, miles ahead of any system that was serving in the market at the time. We also needed to give enterprises the ability to create extremely personalized, meaningful experiences for their employees. More importantly, they needed a system that empowers employees on the go.
We built exactly that. An extremely configurable HCM that truly puts the control in HR’s hands allows complex enterprises to manage change at scale with ease. We have repeatedly seen higher adoption numbers in every enterprise implementation where we replace a large legacy player.
Customer centricity is a company value and forms a strong influence on every decision we make. Our implementation teams are comprised of industry experts in HCM that are dedicated to delivering better solutions to our customers.
We believe that the same first principles will allow us to create a strong GTM motion in MENA as well, where the workforce is diverse, distributed and is mobile-first with tech adoption.
Paleti: The last year has been nothing short of a dream run for us in the geographies we already operate in. We are currently the 3rd most popular HCM solution in South Asia and growing at 3X in our newer markets. We are super excited about serving MENA enterprises where we expect to grow by 400% this year. We will be making significant investments to prioritize product development tailored to the local compliance needs and best practices in MENA. We will also be making our mobile application available in Arabic for the region’s power users.
