From Spreadsheets to ₹130 Cr: How Keka Found Product-Market Fit

Keka's early traction came from an unexpected segment: fast-growing mid-market businesses in Tier II cities and emerging business hubs.

These companies were mobile-first and scaling rapidly across sectors, but they were still running their workforce operations through spreadsheets and fragmented manual processes. They were exactly the kind of businesses that needed an integrated platform but had been overlooked by HR software built primarily for large enterprises and compliance teams.

Yalamanchili's core thesis was straightforward: instead of building isolated tools for payroll, attendance, leave, performance, and hiring, build a single connected platform where all of these workflows lived together. That integration became Keka's most durable competitive advantage in a market full of point solutions.

The pandemic became an unexpected accelerant. As remote work became mandatory overnight, enterprises that had relied on legacy, office-bound HR systems suddenly needed mobile-first platforms that could support the HR function from anywhere. Companies that had initially adopted Keka just for attendance or payroll began expanding into performance management, onboarding, hiring, and employee engagement.

"Usage across the organisation and retention were the clearest signals. When teams started relying on the product for core workflows, we knew we had strong product-market fit," Yalamanchili says.

That expansion pattern, starting narrow and growing into a full workforce platform, became the engine behind Keka's growth. Revenue stood at Rs 14.5 Cr in 2021. Following a $1.6 Mn institutional funding round that year, the company achieved 10x ARR growth, and in 2022 raised a $57 Mn Series A from WestBridge Capital. Today, Keka generates over Rs 130 Cr in revenue and serves more than 10,000 organisations globally.

Keka differentiated itself in two deliberate ways.

The first was who the product was actually built for. When Keka was incorporated, most HR tech platforms were designed primarily for administrators and compliance teams, the people managing the system rather than the people using it day to day. Keka built for everyone: employees, managers, HR teams, and finance departments all interacting with the same system regularly. That breadth of usage made the platform far stickier within organisations, since it became embedded into daily operations rather than just a back-office tool that HR alone touched.

The second was reframing the problem itself. Rather than positioning workforce operations as purely an HR concern, Keka positioned it as a business continuity issue. In sectors like healthcare and logistics, where shift scheduling, overtime calculations, and payroll accuracy directly affect operational efficiency, this reframing helped Keka move beyond being seen as just an HRMS provider and gain meaningful traction with larger enterprises.

AI is Keka's next major focus, but the company has deliberately avoided launching it as a standalone product.

Instead, AI has been embedded directly into existing workflows. Keka Hire uses AI for automated job description creation, candidate screening, and interview question generation. Performance management includes AI-assisted goal setting. OKR recommendations are tailored by role.

The broader goal is to use AI to streamline candidate communication and surface workforce insights, improving decision-making and productivity within the workflows people already use rather than asking them to adopt something entirely new.

Despite the competition from both Indian startups and global software companies expanding into payroll, hiring, employee engagement, and workforce management, Yalamanchili believes the Indian HR tech market remains significantly underpenetrated.

More than half of Indian businesses still do not use a formal HR system. That gap represents a substantial opportunity for workforce digitisation, one that Keka intends to keep capturing as it deepens its presence across India, the Middle East, and the US.

The company also sees rising opportunity in sectors where workforce complexity is increasing: healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, and professional services, all of which face the kind of scheduling, compliance, and operational challenges that an integrated platform is well suited to solve.