Darwinbox, an Indian startup building a SaaS platform for hiring, onboarding, and employee administration, has raised $140 million in funding to take on the likes of Rippling and Deel as it seeks to expand internationally, especially in the US. The funding round is being co-led by KKR and Partners Group, and is a mix of primary and secondary share sales, with several unnamed investors selling parts of their stakes.

Darwinbox's investor list includes notable names such as Microsoft, Salesforce, Sequoia, TCV, Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India), and Lightspeed. The company has now raised around $270 million in total, although it did not respond to questions on its valuation in this latest round. However, reports suggest that the company's price tag is pegged at $950 million, which would make this fundraise a down-round, considering it raised funding at a valuation of over $1 billion in 2022.

For context, two of the bigger startups in the HR-tech space — Deel and Rippling — are both valued around $12 billion to $13 billion. Darwinbox's other competitors include providers of point solutions as well as large, older incumbents like SAP, Oracle, and Workday, and dozens of other companies. Despite being smaller, Darwinbox is a business worth watching for several reasons.

One reason is that it's one of the wave of home-grown enterprise startups that have emerged from India and Southeast Asia in the last several years as the region's technology ecosystem matures and expands beyond e-commerce. This trend has been described as "the SaaS-ification of Asia," and with the enormous amounts of money flowing in the region, and its collective population, it's clearly a region one should be looking to for the next big thing in tech.

Another reason is that Darwinbox has managed to transcend its region and gain some traction in the coveted US market. The company says it has more than 1,000 enterprise customers and provides tools to manage employee administration for more than 3 million people in total. It targets mid-market companies with 3,000 employees or more, and about 60% of its revenue now comes from outside of India. Jayant Paleti, who founded the company with Rohit Chennemaneni and Chaitanya Peddi, told TechCrunch that the US is the company's fastest-growing market, and he has relocated to the US, in Texas, to square up to the opportunity there.

Darwinbox takes an all-in-one, ambitious approach to HR, aiming to build an end-to-end platform that can be used not just to source and manage recruiting, but also to later onboard employees, manage their administration throughout their period of employment (expenses, vacation and time worked, payroll, etc.), and beyond. Paleti said the next stage of the product will likely involve significantly more AI, which he thinks the company is well-positioned to execute because of its platform approach: it can power services holistically.

"We are the system of record for HR," Paleti said. Partners Group, one of the two lead investors in this round, is taking a $75 million stake in the company with this deal, Cyrus Driver, its MD for private equity, told TechCrunch. Driver said his firm has been wanting to invest for a couple of years, but only got the opportunity with this latest round.

"We see them as one of a handful of disruptors in the bigger space displacing global majors," Driver said, noting that the startup's ability to localize its product as it has grown has also been a standout feature. "We did a lot of due diligence, and they have a conviction on the right to win."

As Darwinbox continues to expand globally, it will be interesting to see how it competes with established players in the HR-tech space. With its ambitious approach to HR and its growing presence in the US, Darwinbox is definitely a company to watch in the coming years.