Reimagined Employee R&R

With technology increasingly taking centre stage to the point where companies are adopting HR tech-enabled products for improving employee experience, real-time interactions, gamification and internal customer relationship management, rewards and recognition too have become an integral area where tech helps with the larger company goals.  

In the DNA 

Hailing from a business community, Manoj Agarwal believes entrepreneurship is part of his DNA. The scale of technology products and deep regard for human capital were two major dimensions added to his entrepreneurial mindset owing to his professional stints at Yahoo and Flipkart.  

In 2012, he along with three co-founders started Giftxoxo as an experiences and activities marketplace. The team gradually realised though that the business was ahead of its time as both supply and demand were fragmented in India.  

“Our mission is to bring simplicity and continuity to a complex, everyday problem of human motivation, using technology,” asserts Xoxoday’s Agarwal. 

In 2017, the IIM Kozhikode alumnus pivoted into Xoxoday which is a SaaS platform that provides technology infrastructure to enable businesses to automate rewards, incentives and payouts processes across the value chain. The company today employs 300 people and works with over 2,000 enterprises globally. Customer companies use Xoxoday products to improve their channel performance, sales performance, increase employee engagement, and build brand loyalty and retention with their customers and employees.  

A Growing Platform 

Xoxoday has raised a multi-million dollar fund recently that is yet to be announced next month. In Giftxoxo, a seed round of Rs 3 crore was raised. However, Xoxoday has been bootstrapped making annual recurring revenue of $9 million (2021-22) and is a profitable venture. 

Today, Xoxoday has a suite of three products including Plum, a horizontal platform for rewards, incentives, and payouts; Empuls, a vertical platform that enables holistic employee engagement; and Compass, a platform to turbocharge sales channels through gamification and real-time commissions. 

Creating a brand name for Xoxoday that was digitising a space primarily served by legacy systems and manual processes, was challenging. “Breaking through the barrier of being unknown and creating trust in this high monetary transaction business was very critical and demanding,” shares Agarwal.