hyderabad-startup
(3)
Vijay Yalamanchili
Vijay Yalamanchili is the founder and CEO of Keka HR, a Hyderabad-born HR and payroll software company he built after growing frustrated with the clunky HR tools on the market. An engineer by training with earlier startups behind him, he bootstrapped Keka for roughly six years before raising a $57 million round from WestBridge Capital in 2022, reported at the time as India's largest Series A for a SaaS company. Keka now serves thousands of organizations and processes payroll for millions of employees each month, built around a focus on employee experience and disciplined, profit-led growth.
byteXL
byteXL is a Hyderabad-based education-technology company that partners with engineering colleges and universities to make students job-ready. Through a hybrid model of on-campus training, a cloud-based coding platform and guided placement support, it teaches emerging technologies such as AI/ML, cloud computing, cybersecurity and full-stack development - focused largely on students in India's tier 2 and tier 3 cities. Founded in 2019 by brothers Karun and Sricharan Tadepalli, byteXL aims to bridge the gap between what colleges teach and what the IT industry hires for.
Keka HR
Keka HR is a cloud-based human resource, payroll and people-operations platform for small and mid-sized businesses. Founded in Hyderabad in 2014 by Vijay Yalamanchili, it bundles payroll, attendance, leave, performance, hiring and employee-engagement tools into a single self-serve system. After bootstrapping for years, Keka raised a $57 million Series A from WestBridge Capital in 2022 - reported as India's largest Series A in SaaS at the time - and now serves thousands of companies while processing payroll for more than a million employees each month.