In September 2019 a startup that had spent years trying to rebuild the professional résumé on a blockchain quietly dropped that pitch and renamed itself Springworks. The company that emerged from that decision now files audited revenue in the ₹10–50 crore band (roughly $1.0–5.2 million) with its registrar and, unlike its better-hyped blockchain predecessor, actually turns a net profit.
Springworks is the trade name of Springrole India Private Limited, a Bengaluru HR-tech company that sells background verification (SpringVerify), remote team games (Trivia), recognition tools (EngageWith) and a free applicant tracker (SpringRecruit). One point worth settling up front, because the confusion is common: this Springworks is unrelated to SpringWorks Therapeutics, the US oncology drugmaker listed on Nasdaq that Merck agreed to acquire in 2025. Same-sounding name, entirely different company, industry and owners.
Quick facts
| Company | Springworks (legal entity: Springrole India Private Limited, CIN U72900KA2017PTC104324) |
| Founded | Idea as SpringRole from 2014; Indian entity incorporated 3 July 2017; rebranded to Springworks September 2019 |
| Founder(s) | Kartik Mandaville (founder & CEO; DIN 06717977). Co-director: Vinay Kumar Agarwal (DIN 07726426) |
| Businesses | SpringVerify (background checks), Trivia (team games), EngageWith (recognition), SpringRecruit (free ATS), plus the older SpringRole profile platform and a newer Goodfit hiring product |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹10–50 crore band for FY25 (year ended 31 March 2025), up about 16.8% YoY (MCA filing via Tofler/Tracxn; exact figure not publicly disclosed) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net profit positive in FY25, up about 8.0% YoY; EBITDA down about 15.1% YoY (MCA filing via Tofler) |
| Listed | Private (unlisted) |
| Market value / last valuation | Reported post-money valuation of about $7.5 million at its May 2018 Series A (about ₹72 crore at today’s rate); no newer round disclosed (Tracxn) |
| Key people / backers | CEO Kartik Mandaville; early backers Science Inc, Bloomberg Beta and AlphaBlock |
What they do
Springworks sells software that sits around the edges of hiring and employee engagement, mostly to HR and people teams, and mostly delivered inside the tools those teams already use, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. It is a portfolio of point products rather than one monolithic suite:
- SpringVerify — employment background verification (identity, education, employment, criminal and address checks). Company-stated performance: about 80% of checks completed within 48 hours, with 100+ HRIS/ATS integrations (SpringVerify product pages, 2026).
- Trivia — real-time games and quizzes inside Slack and Microsoft Teams for remote team-building; listed on Microsoft AppSource from October 2022. Product Hunt lists reach of 600,000+ employees across 40,000+ organisations.
- EngageWith — peer recognition, rewards and pulse surveys inside Slack/Teams; launched towards the end of 2020 for remote-work engagement (Springworks blog).
- SpringRecruit — a free applicant tracking system, positioned to pull small teams into the ecosystem at zero cost.
- SpringRole / Goodfit — the original blockchain-verified profile platform, plus a newer AI-native hiring product Springworks now features on its site (About Us, 2026).
The common thread is distribution: rather than build a heavyweight standalone dashboard, Springworks embeds in chat tools and charges for the workflow it removes. It also runs an HR community, The Shape of Work, with 325,000+ members (company-stated), which doubles as a marketing funnel.
The origin
The founder is Kartik Mandaville, who took a master’s at Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute before starting the company that would become Springworks. The first idea was not HR software at all. It was SpringRole, an attempt to rebuild the professional profile — think a verified, tamper-proof LinkedIn — on a blockchain, so that a person’s claimed skills and work history could be attested and checked without a central gatekeeper.
The pitch found a receptive early audience in the 2017–2018 crypto cycle. SpringRole was backed by Michael Jones’s Los Angeles startup studio Science Inc, by Bloomberg Beta, and by the blockchain-focused AlphaBlock, and it ran a dual base in Santa Monica and Bengaluru. The Indian operating entity, Springrole India Private Limited, was incorporated on 3 July 2017 in Koramangala, Bengaluru. The founding insight was sound in the abstract: hiring runs on trust, and trust in a candidate’s history is expensive to establish. The bet was that a blockchain could make that trust portable. The market disagreed about the mechanism, if not the problem.
The struggle years
Springworks has been unusually public about the parts that did not work, which makes the setbacks easy to date rather than guess at.
The first near-death was a platform dependency. In its early marketplace phase SpringRole scaled to roughly $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue, by the company’s own account, largely by building on top of LinkedIn’s data. When LinkedIn cut off that API access, the revenue line that had been working evaporated. A business that had found product-market fit on someone else’s platform lost it the moment the platform changed its mind — a classic and brutal lesson about building on rented land.
The second was the blockchain thesis itself. After years of work on a decentralised profile network, adoption stayed thin: the company later acknowledged there were simply not enough real-world use cases for blockchain outside finance to sustain a consumer professional network. The token-and-profile idea did not convert into a durable business. By 2019 SpringRole was openly describing a shift of focus toward B2B products, and the consumer blockchain dream was effectively parked. Two swings, two misses — and only a small amount of outside capital to absorb them.
The turning point
The pivot crystallised in September 2019, when SpringRole rebranded to Springworks. The company’s own explanation was that the SpringRole name no longer described the scope of what it was building to simplify hiring; in practice, the rename marked the move from a single blockchain product to a portfolio of pragmatic, revenue-generating HR tools.
The numbers on each side of that line are stark in kind, if not always in precise value. Before: a blockchain profile network with a marketplace that had briefly touched about $50,000 MRR on LinkedIn’s rails, then lost it, and a token idea that never scaled. After: a set of B2B products — SpringVerify for background checks, Trivia and later EngageWith for engagement — that grew into a company employing 296 people as of 31 August 2025 (about 32% headcount growth year on year, per Tracxn) and filing audited revenue in the ₹10–50 crore band with a net profit. A second, structural turning point followed on 6 May 2020, when Springworks announced a remote-first future; going fully distributed both fit its Slack/Teams-native products and turned its own workforce into a live test bed for the engagement tools it sells.
The money behind it
Springworks is a lightly funded company by Indian startup standards, and the exact total is one of the few genuinely contested facts about it:
- Total raised: about $1.3 million across three rounds per Tracxn; Crunchbase profiles list a higher figure of up to roughly $3 million across four rounds. The two trackers disagree, so treat the total as low single-digit millions of dollars rather than a precise number.
- Series A: dated 14 May 2018, a small round (about $0.6 million) at a reported post-money valuation of about $7.5 million (about ₹72 crore at today’s rate) — the last valuation on public record (Tracxn).
- Named backers and what they brought:
- Science Inc — the Santa Monica startup studio, which gave SpringRole its US base, network and early credibility.
- Bloomberg Beta — the machine-intelligence-focused fund, an early institutional name on the cap table.
- AlphaBlock — a blockchain-oriented backer aligned with the original token thesis.
The important thing about this shape is what it forced. With so little venture capital raised, Springworks could not buy growth; it had to reach breakeven and then fund expansion largely from its own cash flow. That constraint is visible in the outcome: a small, profitable, self-directed company rather than a cash-burning growth story.
How it makes money
The revenue model is subscription and usage software sold to businesses, with a deliberate free tier feeding the paid ones:
- Money in: per-check fees and plans on SpringVerify (the clearest usage-priced line, tied to hiring volume); per-seat or per-workspace subscriptions on Trivia and EngageWith inside Slack/Teams; SpringRecruit offered free to widen the top of the funnel.
- Costs out: engineering and product salaries (its single largest cost as a software firm), plus the variable cost of running verification checks — database access, field agents and third-party data for SpringVerify — which carries lower gross margin than pure SaaS.
- Where the margin sits: the software engagement products (Trivia, EngageWith) are high-margin SaaS; verification is more operationally heavy. The blend is why a profitable HR-tech firm can still see EBITDA move around year to year.
- The part people get wrong: Springworks is often read as a single background-check company. It is better understood as a distribution machine that lands inside Slack and Teams cheaply (often free), then cross-sells paid workflows — verification, recognition, hiring — to the same customer.
The numbers
Springrole India Private Limited files with India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs, but the exact rupee figures for revenue and profit sit behind paid filing databases; what is public is the revenue band and the year-on-year movement. Presented honestly, unit in ₹ crore where a range is disclosed:
| Metric (FY ends 31 March) | FY24 | FY25 |
| Operating revenue (₹ crore) | Within the ₹10–50 crore band | ₹10–50 crore band; up about 16.8% YoY |
| Net profit (PAT) | Positive | Positive; up about 8.0% YoY |
| EBITDA (YoY change) | Down about 49.4% | Down about 15.1% |
| Net worth (YoY change) | Up about 18.3% | Up about 16.7% |
| Total assets (YoY change) | — | Up about 47.1% |
- Revenue is growing at a modest, self-funded clip: a one-year revenue CAGR of about 17% into FY25 (Tofler/Tracxn on the MCA filing).
- The company is profitable at the net line, which is rare for a lightly funded HR-tech firm and consistent with its low burn.
- EBITDA has fallen two years running even as revenue and net worth rose — a sign of margin pressure lower in the P&L (likely rising operating and verification costs), worth watching.
- Headcount was 296 as of 31 August 2025, up about 32% YoY (Tracxn), so the company is hiring into that growth.
One widely indexed third-party figure — a claim of about $27.3 million in 2025 revenue on a self-reported data aggregator — is not consistent with the MCA revenue band and is left out here as unverifiable.
Where the money comes from
Springworks does not publish an audited segment split, so the mix below is drawn from product traction and positioning rather than reported revenue by line:
- By product: SpringVerify is the commercial anchor — usage-priced background checks tied directly to customers’ hiring volume — while Trivia and EngageWith monetise engagement inside Slack/Teams. SpringRecruit is a free funnel rather than a revenue line.
- By customer: the base spans startups to larger enterprises; SpringVerify’s early client list included CRED, Simpl and BankOpen (Springworks blog), and the company states it serves 5,000+ companies overall.
- By geography: the roots are cross-border — a Santa Monica and Bengaluru setup from the SpringRole days — and the chat-native products (Trivia, EngageWith) sell globally through the Slack and Microsoft marketplaces, not only in India.
The surprise: the free products do a lot of the selling. Trivia’s Product Hunt reach of 600,000+ employees across 40,000+ organisations, and a 325,000-member HR community, are effectively a low-cost acquisition engine that a background-check business would otherwise have to pay a sales team to replicate.
The risks
- Platform dependency, again. Trivia and EngageWith live inside Slack and Microsoft Teams. The company already learned once, painfully, what happens when a platform (LinkedIn) withdraws API access. A change to Slack or Teams app policies, pricing or discovery could hit distribution the same way, and Springworks does not control those rails.
- Margin drift. EBITDA has declined for two consecutive years (about 49% in FY24 and about 15% in FY25 YoY) even as revenue grew. If operating and verification costs keep rising faster than price, the net profit that distinguishes Springworks from its peers could thin out.
- Scale and concentration. This is a small company — revenue in the ₹10–50 crore band, under 300 staff, roughly $1–3 million ever raised. It competes in background verification against far larger, better-capitalised incumbents, and in engagement against a crowded field of Slack/Teams apps; a well-funded rival bundling the same features for free is a live threat.
The takeaway
Springworks is a study in surviving your own first idea. The blockchain profile network did not work, the LinkedIn-powered marketplace was taken away, and the company had raised too little to brute-force a way out. What it did instead was cheap and unglamorous: it built small products that lived where its customers already worked, gave some away, and charged for the ones that removed real work. The transferable lesson is that distribution can matter more than the original thesis — a modest, profitable business embedded in Slack and Teams outlasted a well-pitched idea that owned a category on paper. Building on your own rails, and reaching breakeven before you need the next round, buys you the right to be wrong twice.
Frequently asked questions
Is Springworks the same as SpringWorks Therapeutics?
No. Springworks is a Bengaluru HR-tech company (legal entity Springrole India Private Limited) founded by Kartik Mandaville. SpringWorks Therapeutics is a separate US oncology drugmaker listed on Nasdaq that Merck agreed to acquire in 2025. They share only a similar name.
What does Springworks sell?
HR and people-team software: SpringVerify for background verification, Trivia for team games inside Slack and Microsoft Teams, EngageWith for recognition and surveys, SpringRecruit as a free applicant tracker, plus the older SpringRole profile platform and a newer Goodfit hiring product.
Is Springworks profitable, and how big is it?
Yes, on public filings. Springrole India Private Limited reported a positive net profit in FY25 (year ended 31 March 2025), with revenue in the ₹10–50 crore band, up about 16.8% year on year, and 296 employees as of 31 August 2025 (MCA filing via Tofler/Tracxn).
How much funding has Springworks raised?
Roughly $1.3 million across three rounds per Tracxn, though Crunchbase lists up to about $3 million across four rounds. Its May 2018 Series A carried a reported post-money valuation of about $7.5 million, the last valuation on public record. Early backers include Science Inc, Bloomberg Beta and AlphaBlock.
Who founded Springworks?
Kartik Mandaville, a Carnegie Mellon graduate, who started the company as the blockchain profile platform SpringRole before rebranding it to Springworks in September 2019 and pivoting to B2B HR software.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Tofler — Springrole India Private Limited, company financials and filing summary (September 2026)
- Zaubacorp / Tracxn legal-entity profile — Springrole India Private Limited, CIN, incorporation, directors, capital (September 2026)
- Tracxn — Springworks company profile: funding, valuation, revenue band, headcount (September 2026)
- Crunchbase — Springworks funding rounds and investors (September 2026)
- Springworks Blog — “SpringRole is now Springworks. Here’s why” and “Updates on SpringRole: Shifting Focus to B2B” (2019)
- Springworks / About Us and product pages — SpringVerify, Trivia, EngageWith, remote-first announcement, community size (2026)
- Product Hunt — Trivia reach across organisations (2026)
- GlobeNewswire / Newswire — Trivia on Microsoft AppSource (October 2022)
- Trading Economics — USD/INR reference rate (18 September 2026)
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