2021 continues to impress, as the Indian start-up sector continues to grow amidst the record inflow of capital from global investors. Firms benefitted from this trend, gobbling up capital, expanding their business, and even evolving into unicorns. This time, the unicorn family got a new member in the form of sales readiness platform Mindtickle, which has now crossed the threshold of having a valuation of $1 billion after raising an additional $100 million in its latest Series E funding round led by its existing investor SoftBank Vision Fund II.
Existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Canaan, NewView Capital, and Qualcomm Ventures also participated in the round as the valuation of the Pune and San Francisco-based start-up more than doubled to come to $1.2 billion. The start-up has raised $281 million in funding to date, with the last being in November 2020 ($100 million). It aims to use the proceeds from the funding round to get more clients, make more acquisitions, and improve its existing products.
The ten-year-old start-up, which became the eighth Indian SaaS unicorn and 20th overall this year, was founded by Krishna Depura, Deepak Diwakar, and Nishant Mungali, and has been known to provide AI-based sales technology to improve the selling, gaining product knowledge, and awareness of the competition. It helps companies be ready to grow revenue by increasing seller knowledge and skillsets and incorporating real-world feedback, understanding ideal sales behaviors, and adapting to change. It has come a long way from helping mid-size and large enterprises and today counts among its clients names like MongoDB, Nutanix, Cloudera, Merck & Co, AppDynamics Inc., Johnson & Johnson, and others across industries such as financial services, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and oil and gas.
“Revenue leaders understand that sales readiness is a mission-critical component of their strategy to consistently meet or exceed their goals,” said Krishna Depura, Mindtickle CEO and co-founder. “They are taking more square ownership of these programmes, and partnering with their sales enablement, revenue operations, and training teams to create a continuous state of excellence across their organizations.”
The evolution of Mindtickle is all the more significant since the number of SaaS unicorns is expected to increase by 10 times by 2030, reaching $1 trillion in value and create half-a-million jobs by 2030. Additionally, sales enabling tech are expected to grow to $4.2 billion by 2027 while the conversation intelligence market is set to reach $13 billion by 2025.
“We continue to be impressed by Mindtickle’s performance in creating and becoming a category leader in the sales readiness space,” said Munish Varma, Managing Partner, SoftBank Investment Advisers, adding, “The product has become an essential part of any sales organization and we are excited to support the company in its growth.”
