indian-saas
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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.
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.
Freshworks
Freshworks is a cloud-based business software company that builds easy-to-use customer service, IT service management and CRM tools for companies that found legacy enterprise software too complicated and too expensive. Founded in Chennai in 2010 as Freshdesk, it became the first India-born SaaS company to list on Nasdaq in 2021 and now serves tens of thousands of customers worldwide with an AI assistant, Freddy, woven through its products.