Vijay Yalamanchili

Founder & CEO Keka HR

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Vijay Yalamanchili built Keka HR because he could not buy what he needed. Running a growing technology services business in Hyderabad, he went looking for HR and payroll software and found an Indian market whose products were, in his assessment, unusable - built for compliance officers rather than for the employees who had to live in them. Keka is the alternative he built, a cloud platform covering HR management, payroll automation, recruiting, leave, attendance and performance, sold on the premise that the employee experience matters more than administrative convenience. The company stayed bootstrapped for roughly six years, passing $1M in annual recurring revenue by 2019 and growing sharply through the pandemic, before raising a $57M Series A from WestBridge Capital in November 2022 that was reported as the largest ever raised by an Indian SaaS company. It has since grown past 550 employees and thousands of client companies across some thirty countries. He continues to run his first company in parallel, now trading as Tezo.

Career Highlights

• Founded Keka HR in Hyderabad in the mid-2010s and has led it as CEO throughout, building it into one of India’s most recognised HR technology brands.
• Kept the company bootstrapped for roughly six years, reaching more than $1M in annual recurring revenue by 2019 on its own cash.
• Grew sales roughly sevenfold during 2020, as distributed work pushed HR systems from back-office software to operational necessity.
• Raised a $57M Series A from WestBridge Capital in November 2022, reported as the largest Series A raised by an Indian SaaS company, having earlier taken $1.6M through the revenue-based financing platform Recur Club in 2021.
• Scaled the business past 550 employees and, as of the most recent published figures, over 6,500 client companies across around thirty countries.
• Established offices in Singapore and Seattle alongside the Gachibowli headquarters in Hyderabad.
• Won the HYSEA Startup Award in 2015.
• Serves as founder and CEO of Tezo, formerly Technovert, a technology services firm working in AI, data engineering and digital modernisation for clients including Fortune 500 banks and fintechs.

Professional Journey

Yalamanchili’s first company is the one most accounts skip, and it is where Keka comes from. He founded the technology services business now known as Tezo - previously Technovert, bootstrapped, by the company’s own telling, on a college campus rather than in a boardroom - and built it into a firm doing AI, data and digital engineering work for enterprise clients including Fortune 500 banks and fintech companies. He remains its founder and chief executive.

Running that business is what produced Keka. A services company is people, and as headcount grew he needed software to manage hiring, leave, attendance, payroll and performance. What he found in the Indian market did not satisfy him: the products existed but were built around statutory compliance and payroll processing, difficult to use, and indifferent to the experience of the employee sitting on the other side of them. His conclusion was that the gap was large enough to be a business.

Keka was established in the mid-2010s - sources disagree between a 2014 incorporation and a 2015 operational start with five employees - and grew slowly and deliberately. It stayed bootstrapped for about six years, which in Indian SaaS during that period was a deliberate contrarian stance, and Yalamanchili has been consistent in public about why. His stated position is that discipline is what matters when investing for growth out of profits, and that a company should establish profitability before expanding rather than substituting external capital for a working model. The company passed $1M in annual recurring revenue in 2019 on that basis.

The pandemic changed the pace. With workforces dispersed overnight, HR and attendance systems stopped being administrative overhead and became the only way many companies could see their own staff, and Keka’s sales rose roughly sevenfold in 2020. That growth, on top of years of capital discipline, made for an unusually strong position when the company finally did raise: WestBridge Capital put in $57M in November 2022, a round widely reported as the largest Series A an Indian SaaS company had raised.

Since then the business has scaled to more than 550 employees and, on the most recent figures found, over 6,500 client companies across around thirty countries, with offices in Singapore and Seattle in addition to Hyderabad. Growth has carried a cost, with filings showing revenue of Rs 78 crore in FY24 alongside losses up 2.8 times. The culture Yalamanchili describes for both the product and the company is built on self-accountability rather than process enforcement, summarised in a maxim he repeats often - don’t wait for the change, just be the change.

Education

No educational background could be established for Vijay Yalamanchili. No university, degree or field of study appears in any source consulted in this pass, including his own published interviews.