Sequoia Capital leads $15m series A round for Indian staff management startup

India’s staff management solutions provider PagarBook announced it has secured US$15 million in a series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital India, with participation from India Quotient.

Prior to this, the startup had raised a seed round from India Quotient and Sequoia Capital India’s scale-up program Surge.

PagarBook co-founders (from left to right) Adarsh Kumar, Arya Adarsha Gautam, and Rupesh Kumar Mishra / Photo credit: Sequoia Capital India

Founded in December 2019, PagarBook claims its platform can help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) save time on managing and maintaining attendance records, speed up payment cycles, and reduce disputes. Its workforce management app can also help eliminate human errors in wage calculation, payment of salaries, and other aspects of human resource management.

According to the company, most of India’s 500 million workforce is employed with the country’s 60 million micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). However, these MSMEs keep manual employee records, making it challenging to track attendance, wage details, loans, expenses, and salary advances.

Employees, meanwhile, do not receive any formal employment benefits and often don’t have access to the formal banking system due to the lack of pay slips and employment history documentation.

With the fresh funds, PagarBook plans to further develop its product and drive customer acquisition. It also plans to add financial products to its platform such as payments and credit for MSMEs and their employees in the coming year.

The company says it has over 5 million SMEs registered on the platform, with 80% of them non-wholesale and retail shopkeepers.

It currently claims to manage around 2% of India’s SME workforce, with an aim to grow this figure 5x by 2021, said company co-founder Rupesh Kumar Mishra.

In the last six months, PagarBook has grown by more than 100x and now tracks attendance and processes payroll for millions of Indians, thanks to the wave of digitization among Indian MSMEs, according to Ashish Agrawal, principal at Sequoia India.