How Keka Found The PMF To Build A ₹130 Cr HR Tech Business

It was 2014, and HR managers were actively discussing how they could move beyond traditional administrative responsibilities to become strategic business partners. At the time, HR departments across India were largely confined to back-office functions such as payroll and attendance management, with limited technology available to support broader people management functions and strategic decision-making.

Vijay Yalamanchili, now the founder and CEO of Keka (an HR tech platform), was watching this closely. He observed that the HR tech SaaS market was getting stifled with highly fragmented payroll and attendance management tools. Therefore, to salvage the HR function, he envisioned a platform that could track the entire employee lifecycle, from hiring to retirement. To usher the HR function into a new age, Yalamanchili focused on solving connected workflows instead of building isolated features.

That vision led to the launch of Keka in 2016.

Keka today serves more than 10,000 organisations globally. It offers a unified platform for managing everything from payroll and attendance to hiring, performance management, employee engagement and workforce analytics.

It also allows businesses to manage a wide range of workforce functions on a single platform, including onboarding, performance management, OKRs, hiring workflows, geofencing, workforce analytics, employee engagement, timesheets, resource allocation, and profitability tracking.

Today, Keka is a ₹130 Cr+ revenue-generating company. Interestingly, most of this growth has been achieved in the last few years. Its revenues in 2021 stood at ₹14.5 Cr. The company claims to have achieved 10X ARR growth since its institutional funding round of $1.6 Mn in 2021. Its next funding milestone came in 2022 when it raised $57 Mn in Series A funding from WestBridge Capital.

So, what enabled it to identify the opportunity and win in a crowded HR software market? The answer to this lies in how Yalamanchili looked at the market to find the product-market fit (PMF).