India-born HR Tech Startup uKnowva Accelerates Expansion in the MENA Region; partners with 1st Talent LLC in KSA
HR automation software startup, uKnowva has recently partnered with 1sTalent LLC to scale its presence in the MENA region. uKnowva has been delivering enterprise cloud applications for human resources to many corporate and technology companies in India. The partnership will help uKnowva with 200-300 percent growth in 2022.
uKnowva is a cloud-based HR solution that offers a private and secure platform for employees to engage in seamless networking and communication, sharing of knowledge and leveraging the capabilities of business productivity tools to achieve accelerated growth and increased productivity.
Speaking about expanding their reach in the MENA region, CEO and Founder of uKnowva, Vicky Jain said, “The MENA region has a unique HR landscape with challenges such as high reliance on expatriate workers, workforce nationalization policies, and strict workers visa regulations as well as strong public sector presence. Companies are realizing the urgent need to invest and transform their HR departments. The market in KSA was very narrow until recently when MBS has initiated a lot of policies for globalization and opening up companies to do better business in KSA. Our main focus would be to accelerate growth and product innovation tailored for MENA. We will also build strategic partner networks in the MENA region to complement our technology offering with transformation advisory.”
KSA has a 14 million labour workforce and the market size would be at least half a billion USD per year. As compared to customers in India who are very cost conservative, in KSA, customers are ready to pay a high premium for better quality. Also, as per a report in 2018 Indians departing to the west Asian nation of Saudi Arabia accounted for approximately 1.44 million. Saudi Arabia has also recently announced more than US$6.4 billion in investments in future technologies and entrepreneurship that will further secure the Kingdom’s position as the MENA region’s largest digital economy. Thus, the MENA region is a potential and one of the fastest-growing markets for Indian Tech startups.
“Recent market and technology shifts, along with the impact of the pandemic, have compromised the effectiveness of traditional approaches and accelerated changes to the way we source, hire and inspire the best talent. Adapting the approach to talent acquisition and engagement often requires an upgrade to your HR tech stack, however selecting new technology solutions can be overwhelming. Given how quickly the technology landscape is changing, many of the recruitment solutions sold by vendors today are outdated. With uKnowva HR tech solutions things turned out to be different and helped us to connect internally in a seamless way. Earlier things moved around at a slow pace in our organization due to the lack of an efficient mechanism in knowledge sharing and communication, but after the implementation of uKnowva, things have improved and changed for the better. Knowledge sharing has improved and the process of collaboration among various team members has enhanced resulting in improved productivity. What makes uKnowva strong for the KSA market is the user-friendly module which will make us compete in the market very strongly and become the first choice of customers” said Mutassim Alqahtani, Director, 1sTalent LLC.
uKnowva is also planning to have some feature additions mainly to localize the product in the region like Arabic translation and other features that are more related to payroll changes to match the law of the land. Over the next 5 years, uKnowva will be specifically targeting countries like KSA, UAE, and Egypt to become the most preferred HRMS software platform in the region. Recently the bootstrapped company also became the first in India to create an HR portal that can be accessed by people regardless of their abilities.
