Two Indian Engineers Built an HR Platform Processing $23 Billion in Annual Payroll from Bengaluru Without Silicon Valley

Abstract

Greytip Software and its major product greytHR have developed through a thirty-year history, and greytHR is a cloud-based HR software platform serving over 30,000 companies across 25 countries, processing approximately $23 billion in annual payroll transactions. Girish Rowjee and Sayeed Anjum established the firm in Bengaluru, India in 1994. The story Greytip tells breaks several assumptions held by people of Indian entrepreneurship and product development. This paper will analyze the strategic choices made in the firm, technology breakthroughs, and the positioning of the product in the market and find out how bootstrapped capital, domain knowledge and patient product development created a world-class B2B software platform. Three strategic pillars outlined by the research include full integration that will substitute the fragmented HR work processes mobile-first design that will take advantage of the Indian smartphone boom and artificial intelligence-based automation that will address the recruitment and attendance issues and queries by staff. As it is shown in the case, India is capable of producing sustainable global software companies without Silicon Valley investments. It demonstrates that a solution of practical, necessary business issues generates defensible benefits, and that thorough knowledge of the regulators together with technological superiority generates barriers which it cannot be reproduced by pure technology. The results can be applied to future entrepreneurs, investors considering B2B opportunities, and policymakers based on the development of the SaaS ecosystem in India.