Aakash Chaudhry invests $4 million; HONO plans expansion to UAE, Singapore and Indonesia – Times of India

NEW DELHI: Aakash Chaudhry, managing director, Aakash+BYJU’s has led the Series A funding of HONO – a frontrunner in Human Resource Automation – by investing $4 Million. With over 300+ clients like Indigo Airlines, Spencer’s Retail, Kanmo Group, Dainik Bhaskar, Al Fardan Group, NBC Bearings, HDFC Bank, Medicover, Aakash+BYJU’S already on its client list, and over 1 million employees on its AI-backed platform, HONO has achieved growth of 2X during financial year 2022.

HONO has raised USD 1 Million from other individual investors such as Hemant Sultania, Amit Khanna of Amaya Ventures, and Harsh Gupta of Udayat Group.

They now intend to scale the business and their sales vertical, and plan to double their client numbers, aiming at supporting 5 million people on the HONO platform in the current financial year 2023.

Speaking to the TOI, Chaudhry said: “We had a very good experience with HONO as partners for the last five years and I personally believe that post Covid the need for better HR, especially AI driven, productivity driven, HR platform is becoming a need. And we feel that without our experience of scale up and managing people, we can actually build a very good business for the owners.”

“We are bringing in a lot of experience. We understand technology because we are good at Edtech, we understand scaling because we scale all across the country, understand branding and marketing, we understand talent identification and talent build up all across the country differently in a very, very different and hostile environment. I think there is a whole gamut of experience, mentorship, and enablement that we can bring to the table,” added Chaudhry.

Strategically, HONO is looking to leverage the fresh corpus of funds to expand its operations across India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, with expansion plans in UAE, Singapore and Indonesia.

Mukul Jain, founder and CEO, HONO said: “From current $4 to 5 million revenue we want to scale up the journey to 15 million dollar revenue in the next one and a half to two years. This is the plan today, 1 million user base is there, which you want to take to three to four million user base. This strong happening will lead to substantial value to the company and to our product also.”

Chaudhry said that deep technology is a much bigger revolution than IT as it has crept into the lives of everyone irrespective of their age, socioeconomic status and work profile. “Any innovation, especially in deep innovations around technology, will be far deeper in terms of reach, revenue potential and in life changing transformation than it showed in the 90s.”

“There is a deep involvement of technology in our day to day lives. And I see that becoming more and more entrenched when technology moves into healthcare where there is predictive diagnosis, there are far better results that we can throw in from our artificial intelligence, for example, radiology is going through a very, very different space right now. There are a lot of roles that technology can play – healthcare is one, environment is the second area that is of interest. But apart from that, food consumptions, education, lifestyle habits, all of that is going through a transformation.”