India, June 12 -- It was 2014, and HR managers were actively discussing how they could move beyond traditional administrative responsibilities to become strategic business partners. At the time, HR departments across India were largely confined to back-office functions such as payroll and attendance management, with limited technology available to support broader people management functions and strategic decision-making.

Vijay Yalamanchili, now the founder and CEO of Keka (an HR tech platform), was watching this closely. He observed that the HR tech SaaS market was getting stifled with highly fragmented payroll and attendance management tools. Therefore, to salvage the HR function, he envisioned a platform that could track the entire emp...