Aakash Chaudhry, the managing director of test prep firm Aakash+BYJU’s, on Wednesday led a Series-A funding in HR tech startup Hono.
While Chaudhry invested $4 million (around R.31 crore) in HONO, the startup has raised $1million more from other individual investors including Hemant Sultania, Amit Khanna of Amaya Ventures, and Harsh Gupta of Udayat Group. The series A funding totals $5 million.
Chaudhry has made the investment in his personal capacity and will also be part of the board at the HR tech firm. “Hono was helping us in our talent management for last few years and now we have come on board to help it grow in India and elsewhere. I will be a facilitator and be on their board,” Chaudhry told Moneycontrol on May 11.
Mukul Jain, founder and chief executive of Hono, said Aakash was earlier our client and now our investor. “Having Aakash Chaudhry and our new group of investors in the fold, makes the Hono journey more exciting. Their presence and this strategic investment not only establishes our investors’ faith in the business, but also reinstates our belief and the belief of the market in the direction HONO is evolving,” Jain said.
He said before the Series A funding, Hono had raised $4 million from promoters and angel investors. And after the fresh funding, “we shall use the corpus to expand out footprint in HR automation space in India, south east Asia including Singapore, and middle eastern countries. We shall also increase our product portfolio and headcount in key segments”.
“We have, for years, been advocating that future-readiness of HR or organisation lies in their use of data towards better productivity and happier people. And for that to happen they need to have a single-source-of-truth backed by truly smart systems. With this new impetus, we will be able to take this farther and do it globally, at scale, ” Jain said.
Chaudhry said Hono's emphasis on technology, particularly AI to address, simplify and humanize end- to-end HR processes… and its ability to transform HR into a productivity driver is something we believe in. We expect Hono's growth curve to show a much steeper rise hereon”.
Hono works with around 300 clients and claimed that it will increase three fold in next two to three years.
