Wednesday, September 25, 2019
BigBasket merges 2 core arms to speed up delivery
Etailers target $4.8b sales this festive season
India’s Darwinbox raises $15M to bring its HR tech platform to more Asian markets
An Indian SaaS startup, which is increasingly courting clients from outside of the country, just raised a significant amount of capital to expand its business.
Hyderabad-based Darwinbox, which operates a cloud-based human resource management platform, said on Thursday it has raised $15 million in a new financing round. The Series B round — which moves the firm’s total raise to $19.7 million — was led by Sequoia India and saw participation from existing investors Lightspeed India Partners, Endiya Partners, and 3one4 Capital.
More than 200 firms including giants such as adtech firm InMobi, fintech startup Paytm, drink conglomerate Bisleri, automobile maker Mahindra, Kotak group, and delivery firms Swiggy and Milkbasket use Darwinbox’s HR platform to serve half a million of their employees in 50 nations, Rohit Chennamaneni, cofounder of Darwinbox, told TechCrunch in an interview.
The startup, which competes with giants such as SAP and Oracle, said its platform enables high level of configurability, ease of use, and understands the needs of modern employees. “The employees today who have grown accustomed to using consumer-focused services such as Uber and Amazon are left disappointed in their experience with their own firm’s HR offerings,” said Gowthami Kanumuru, VP Marketing at Darwinbox, in an interview.
Darwinbox’s HR platform offers a range of features including the ability for firms to offer their employees insurance and early salary as loans. Its platform also features social networks for employees within a company to connect and talk, as well as an AI assistant that allows them to apply for a leave or set up meetings with quick voice commands from their phone.
“The AI system is not just looking for certain keywords. If an employee tells the system he or she is not feeling well today, it automatically applies a leave for them,” she said.
Darwinbox’s platform is built to handle onboarding new employees, keeping a tab on their performance, monitor attrition rate, and maintain an ongoing feedback loop. Or as Kanumuru puts it, the entire “hiring to retiring” cycle.
One of Darwinbox’s clients is L&T, which is tasked with setting up subway in many Indian cities. L&T is using geo-fencing feature of Darwin to log the attendance of employees. “They are not using biometric punch machine that is typically used by other firms. Instead, they just require their 1,200 employees to check-in from the workplace using their phones,” said Kanumuru.
Additionally, Darwinbox is largely focusing on serving companies based in Asia as it believes Western companies’ solutions are not a great fit for people here, said Kanumuru. The startup began courting clients in Southeast Asian markets last year.
“Our growth is a huge validation for our vision,” she said. “Within six months of operations, we had the delivery giant Delhivery with over 23,000 employees use our platform.”
In a statement to TechCrunch, Dev Khare, a partner at Lightspeed Venture, said, “there is a new trend of SaaS companies targeting the India/SE Asia markets. This trend is gathering steam and is disproving the conventional wisdom that Asia-focused SaaS companies cannot get to be big companies. We firmly believe that Asia-focused SaaS companies can get to large impact value and become large and profitable. Darwinbox is one of these companies.”
Darwinbox’s Chennamaneni said the startup will use the fresh capital to expand its footprints in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and other Southeast Asian markets. Darwinbox will also expand its product offerings to address more of employees’ needs. The startup is also looking to make its platform enable tasks such as booking of flights and hotels.
Chennamaneni, an alum of Google and McKinsey, said Darwinbox aims to double the number of clients it has in the next six to nine months.
WhatsApp says many requests from cops invalid and deficient
Peloton prices IPO at $29 per share
Exercise bike and treadmill company Peloton priced its initial public offering this evening at $29 per share. As part of the IPO, Peloton is offering 40 million Class A common stock to the public.
Peloton was expected to price its IPO between $26 to $29 per share, so this falls on the higher end. With Peloton selling 40 million Class A shares, it is looking to raise $1.16 billion with a valuation of more than $8 billion.
Peloton filed to go public back in August, reporting $915 million in total revenue for the year ending June 30, 2019. That was an increase of 110% from the fiscal year prior. Prior to this upcoming IPO, Peloton had raised $994 million at a private market valuation of $4.15 billion.
Shares of “PTON” will start trading tomorrow on the Nasdaq.
Policybazaar moves tech services to Zphin
Govt to balance privacy and security in intermediary guidelines
Eko raises $20M Series B for its AI powered in-clinic and at-home cardiac monitoring platform which includes devices that combine digital stethoscope and ECG (Jasmine Pennic/hitconsultant.net)
Eko raises $20M Series B for its AI powered in-clinic and at-home cardiac monitoring platform which includes devices that combine digital stethoscope and ECG — - Funding will be used to accelerate research and development (R&D) and commercialization of Eko's machine learning platform for cardiac screening/analysis.
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
Vivo U3x With Triple Rear Cameras, 5,000mAh Battery Launched
Redmi 8A With 12-Megapixel Camera Launching in India Today: Live Updates
Bombay High Court 2019 – Clerk Exam Result Released
Telangana Police Constable Result 2019 – Provisional List & Cutoff Marks Released
Telangana Police 2019 – Police Constable Provisional List & Cutoff Marks Released
ServiceNow invests $40M in banking software specialist BusinessNext, valuing the 24-year-old Indian company at $700M and taking a roughly 5% stake (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch : ServiceNow invests $40M in banking software specialist BusinessNext, valuing the 24-year-old Indian company ...
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