Dinesh Kumar Khara, former Chairman of the State Bank of India (SBI), has joined as Chairman of the Board. This is a significant leadership addition at a time when PeopleStrong is scaling its AI-led HR and Payroll platform for large enterprises across India, the Middle East, and other growth markets.
PeopleStrong is one of Asia’s leading HR tech platforms, supporting 500 plus organizations and over 2 million employees. The payroll engine processes over 1.75 million monthly paychecks. PeopleStrong partners with companies across BFSI, aviation, manufacturing, healthcare, and large services businesses.
Mr. Dinesh Kumar Khara has now joined PeopleStrong as Chairman of the Board. In this role, he will chair a board that brings together operating leadership, and deep enterprise SaaS experience, including Sandeep Chaudhary (CEO, PeopleStrong), Pankaj Bansal (Co-Founder and board member), Rajat Sood (Goldman Sachs), Franck Cohen (global enterprise software leader), and Sulabh Arya (Goldman Sachs).
This move comes in a year of significant momentum for PeopleStrong. Goldman Sachs Alternatives came on board as a major investor in April 2025. The platform has been named a Customers’ Choice in the Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer report for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000 plus Employee Enterprises for the fourth year in a row. The company is also advancing AI at the core of its product, with live agentic capabilities like the AI Co-Recruiter and the Employee Relations Agent that act directly inside hiring, case management, and workforce support workflows.
Who is Dinesh Kumar Khara
Dinesh Kumar Khara is the former Chairman of the State Bank of India, the banking behemoth and India’s largest bank by assets. He brings more than four decades of leadership experience across banking, risk, governance, and large-scale transformation.
As Chairman, he led SBI through one of its most critical periods. This included steering the institution through the COVID years, managing stability in a volatile environment, and driving a massive wave of digitization so the bank could continue to serve millions of customers and large enterprises without disruption. His approach combined scale, discipline, and public accountability in a sector where there is no room for error.
Sandeep Chaudhary, CEO of PeopleStrong, said:
“We are honoured to welcome Dinesh Khara as Chairman of our Board. His appointment marks a defining moment in our journey to build a world-class SaaS company from India. It will inspire greater client confidence, sharpen our technological edge, and create lasting value for our customers.”
Dinesh Kumar Khara said:
“I am delighted to join PeopleStrong at such an exciting stage in its growth. The company stands at the intersection of talent, technology, and transformation. As India emerges as a global hub for SaaS and AI innovation, I look forward to working with the board and leadership team to shape strategic growth and help build a truly world-class HR platform.”
Building for the future
Work is changing fast. HR and payroll are no longer seen as back-office systems. They sit at the center of how organizations manage cost, performance, productivity, experience, and risk. Leaders across India and the Middle East are asking for platforms that can handle that responsibility with the same discipline they expect from finance and core operations.
Our view is simple. The best organisations in this region deserve world-class HR and Payroll technology that can stand up to global scrutiny. That means governance, reliability, depth, and clarity. It also means intelligent systems that help leaders move faster, not just systems of record.
The leadership is a great mix of SaaS and technology expertise, with demonstrated experience in platform scale-up, execution discipline, and board-level governance. With Dinesh Kumar Khara as Chair, the mandate is to strengthen operating rigor and align product, delivery, and customer outcomes to the standards expected by large organisations in the region.
We are committing to greater depth across the platform, and we hold ourselves to the same standards that our customers expect. Priorities include advancing agentic AI that operates in the flow of work, expanding extensibility through integrations, APIs, configurable workflows, custom fields, and reporting, and elevating capabilities across core systems, workforce, talent, analytics, and employee experience. These are requirements we set for ourselves and requirements our customers rely on as they define the next decade of work.
Recent milestones
Over the past months, PeopleStrong has taken several leaps. We unveiled the AI Co-Recruiter, designed to keep hiring cycles active by automating job creation, screening, and scheduling, and the Employee Relations Agent, which manages employee queries in the flow of work. These are the first of many agentic AI capabilities being built to support enterprise HR and payroll at scale.
In October 2025, PeopleStrong was once again named a Customers’ Choice in Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises, marking the fourth year in a row that enterprise users have rated the platform among the best in its category.
The company has also been recognised with industry honours, including being named Innovative HR Solutions Partner of the Year 2025 at the ET Human Capital Awards – MENA, and winning HR Tech Provider of the Year – Gold at the People Matters InfiniT Awards. These recognitions reflect the trust and impact PeopleStrong continues to build across regions and industries.
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