HR Industry in South Asia: Top 20 Investors According to the Amounts of Funding

Intro

Like many other industries worldwide, the Human Resources field is developing very fast. Traditional practices are combined with new technologies and approaches, such as ML, AI, or Human Resources Management, which help manage employee life cycle and administer the benefits more effectively, to name but a few implications. Along with improvements, there is also a noticeable shift to full-time remote working and digitization: processes like recruiting, employment, or skill assessment, commonly held offline, can now be performed online in some cases.

Valued at $17.56B in 2020, the industry is predicted to show a CAGR of 12.2% from 2021 to 2028, opening up plenty of space for startups to provide innovative solutions like mobile recruitment platforms, automation of manual processes, precise tracking and selection of candidates, and many more. Only in South Asia the last 4 years saw USD 1.2 billion invested into Human Resources, accounting for 1.8% of all money raised in the industry. With Spark Capital and Sequoia Capital India leading, 20 top investors according to the amounts of money they contributed can be listed as follows:

HR Industry in South Asia: Top 20 Investors According to the Amounts of Funding
data provided by Unicorn Nest

Key takeaways

• Funds Geography – The country of origin, India, is common for all the funds from the top 20. Six firms are located in Mumbai; less popular cities of residence are New Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bangalore. Most frequently, the investments are drawn by the products from the United States and India, with the amount of money favoring the latter. The trend is for the investors to put money into the startups from their fund’s country of establishment.
• Industry Focus – Mostly, the funds invest into Finance projects, with Razorpay or Chqbook being one of many possible examples. Other spheres of interest for the listed companies are Enterprise Software (e.g., sumHR, Mumbai), EdTech (Uable, Bengaluru), and Industrial.
• Important Years – The oldest (VenturEast) and the newest (Yatra Angel  Network) funds were established in 1997 and 2020, respectively, with a 23-year difference between them. Most of the VCs were created 5 years ago, in 2016. The 2013-2020 period exposed the highest activity for the sampled investors; some closed the most deals in 2019.
• Investments – Most commonly, the listed funds participate twice or from 2 to 6 times per year. The smallest number of rounds, two, is possessed by Yatra Angel Network, the newest firm from the sample, while the maximum of investment acts is 280. On average, the VCs take part in 84.2 rounds; this figure’s median value is 59.0, and the mode is 22. As for the lead investments, the majority of the companies have never led any rounds. The maximum of this type of financing among the VCs is 122, with an average of 31.7 rounds. The medial number for the lead investments is 20.0. Counted in percentage points, the index of difference between lead investments and the standard lays between -28.26 and 29.0 and averages at -5.57. This difference’s median equals -13.54. Such calculations suggest that certain firms choose to become lead investors less often than the other members of the top 20. The mode for the presented data is 29.0.
• Typical Rounds – Although the investors from the list enter at different stages, Early and Seed funding is more common for them than Late and Venture. Usually, the rounds have from 2 to 3 partakers and are sized not higher than USD 100 000. Rounds with 3-4 investors and 10-50 million dollars of financing happen not so often. The highest known multiplier for portfolio companies of the sampled funds is 3.04. Its average value and the median are much lower, only 0.32 and 0.03, respectively. The most frequent multiplier, according to the last known valuation, equals 0.0.

Summing up, India is the country of origin for all the top 20 most active investors in HR sphere across South Asia. Firms from the sampled diagram usually contribute less than $100.000 per round with 2-6 partakers. The spheres to attract their attention are Finance, Enterprise Software, EdTech, and Idustrial field. The lion’s share of capital goes to the startups from India and the US.