PagarBook raises $15 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital

By Edil Corneille

Bengaluru-based PagarBook announced today the raise of USD 15 million in its Series A funding round, led by Sequoia Capital with participation from India Quotient. Priorly, PagarBook raised a seed round from India Quotient and Sequoia Capital India’s rapid scale-up program Surge.

The funds will be used in further product development and to drive customer acquisition. The company also plans to add financial products such as payments and credit for MSMEs and their employees on the platform over the coming year. PagarBook is a mobile-first staff management solutions provider.

The PagarBook platform helps SMEs in saving time on managing and maintaining attendance records, speeding up payment cycles, reducing disputes, eliminating human errors in wage calculation, payment of salaries and various other aspects of human resource management through an easy-to-use workforce management app.

Adarsh Kumar, Co-founder, PagarBook said, “We are extremely grateful to have partners such as Sequoia Capital India and India Quotient on this journey of solving human capital challenges for millions of Indian SMEs. By enabling SMEs and their workforce to unlock the power of technology in their day-to-day lives, we believe we can create massive impact on a sector that forms the backbone of our economy – and this is what inspires and excites us the most”, to which Rupesh Kumar Mishra, Co-founder, PagarBook added, “India’s 60 million SMEs and its 400 million large workforce contribute roughly 30% of India’s GDP, but still lack a verified financial and professional footprint in any organised technology ecosystem. As a result, they are left out of the mainstream financial ecosystem. At PagarBook, we address this massive gap with our digital human capital platform for SMEs. We are currently managing around 2% of India’s SME workforce and by the end of calendar year 2021, we aim to grow 5x and take this figure to 10%.”

Ashish Agrawal, Principal, Sequoia India said, “We are witnessing a wave of digitization in Indian MSMEs, driven by high smartphone and internet penetration and an ongoing generational transition. In the last 6 months, PagarBook has grown >100x and now tracks attendance and processes payroll for millions of Indians. The firm is excited to deepen its commitment with them”.

PagarBook apprised that in the past seven months, the app has gone from a few thousands to more than 5 million downloads on Play Store. Currently, PagarBook has over 5 million SMEs across over 3,000 locations registered on the platform, who use the app to resolve their staff management challenges. The app is available in 11 Indian languages. Pagarbook’s goal is to further empower a segment of the economy which contributes 30 per cent to the nation’s GDP and 48 per cent to its exports.