A Conversation with Darwinbox — New Age HR Platform

In a first of a series of conversations with our portfolio companies, we spoke to the founders of Darwinbox, a SaaS based Human Capital Management platform, to unravel decisive aspects of the venture that are contributing to its growth and success.

Darwinbox is a new age HR platform which takes care of all HR needs across the employee life cycle — Recruitment, Core transactions (Leaves, Attendance, Directory), Payroll, Employee Engagement, Talent Management and People Analytics. It acts as a one stop shop for streamlining the recruitment and on-boarding process and has an evolutionary talent management system catering to every performance philosophy. Its solutions combine workflow with intelligent insights and smart interfaces.

Having achieved tremendous traction with marquee enterprises and 200,000+ employees already on its platform, the Darwinbox team is on a mission to transform the interaction between workforce and technology, through enterprise products that are as simple and effective to use as daily consumer apps.

The Darwinbox team and what brought them together

Very early on in the chat, it was evident that the Darwinbox team was connected by a clear vision and philosophy that forms a strong foundation for developing the comprehensive, robust and intuitive HR Tech solution.

Speaking of how the team came together to start the company — complementary skill sets, common value systems and a vision to build a great product company out of India, emerged as some of the key factors. Also, the camaraderie the team enjoys is apparent, which seems to build an atmosphere of balance and positivity.

The Evolution of Darwinbox — A SaaS based HR Platform

Delving further into the drivers for the Darwinbox solution, revealed that the market opportunity being addressed was that of a new age enterprise platform that maximized the value of a company’s most critical resource — it’s people. This gives rise to the need for an integrated HR platform across the employee lifecycle that gives a holistic view and useful insights from the data.

The emphasis on ease of use, end user adoption and focus on employee engagement and empowerment are some of the key differentiators that allow the platform to solve fundamental problems that organizations face today with HR systems.

Highlights of the Darwinbox Solution

Being a product that covers the whole gamut of HR activities including recruitment, onboarding, payroll, employee management and performance management, we wanted to understand some of the key features that Darwinbox has architected, compared to what exists out there.

What stood out was the refreshing focus on an engaging pre-onboarding module, and its highly configurable performance module. Another powerful feature of the solution is its ability to provide rich insights by interlinking various data sets across the hire to retire business process. This proves valuable to CxOs enabling them to use these insights in the strategic elements of HR.

Pearls of wisdom

Being entrepreneurs who have built a great enterprise product and achieved tremendous traction in a significantly short amount of time, we were curious to know what guidance they would give to budding entrepreneurs out there.

Customer validation, intensive research, assessing the market opportunity, building an MVP quickly and a quick go-to-market plan, was some of the sound advice we got from the team. Clearly the Darwinbox team has walked the talk and it has worked well for the success of the platform.

Speaking to the team, what strikes you is their dedication to the vision and the clear set of guiding principles they have to scale the product and take it to the next level.

We hope you find these conversations engaging and useful.

As an early investor in Darwinbox, Endiya Partners continues to work closely with the founding team to create a product that is future ready.