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Hyderabad-based HR tech firm Darwinbox has raised around $4.9 million from the State Bank of India (SBI) in an extended Series D round. This comes after it raised $4 million from Microsoft Corporation in November last year.

A year ago, Darwinbox raised $72 million in Series D led by Technology Crossover Ventures with participation from existing investors including Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia Capital India, Lightspeed India, Endiya Partners, JGDEV, 3One4Capital and SCB 10x and achieved unicorn status. 

The company’s board passed a special resolution to issue 14,523 Series D3 compulsory convertible preference shares at an issue price of Rs 28,085 per share to SBI with the amount of offer being nearly Rs 40.82 crore or around $4.9 million by way of private placement and preferential allotment. 

With the latest funding round, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) firm has raised over $115 million so far. It caters to over 700 enterprises in more than 90 countries, as per the company’s website.

The enterprise-SaaS firm, which mainly operates in the Asian markets currently, is looking to go public in about three years.

Darwinbox is yet to post its financial year 2022 results. In FY20-21, it posted revenue of Rs 53.8 crore, almost double of that it earned the previous year. Its losses increased by a little over 36% to Rs 8.7 crore in the same period. 

In the last one year, it has strengthened its senior management team as it looks to scale to go public. A couple of days ago, Darwinbox appointed Panuwat Benrohman as the managing director and country head for Thailand. Arun Dhaka joined the HR tech firm’s executive leadership team as Vice President of Sales – Asia Pacific & Japan a month ago. In May last year, ex-Microsoft leader Gautam Goenka joined the company as Senior Vice President, Engineering. 

The company was looking to hire 500 more employees globally over the next one year or so. It inaugurated its new global headquarters in Hyderabad recently, said a media report dated November 2022. It has close to 1,000 employees currently.

The company was founded by Rohit Chennamaneni, Chaitanya Peddi and Jayant Paleti in 2015.