Drivetrain AI Inc., a financial planning, monitoring and decision-making platform, has raised $15 million (Rs 120 crore) in a Series A funding round led by Elevation Capital, Jungle Ventures and Venture Highway.
The round has also seen participation from several executives in tech and finance, including, Akshay Kothari (Notion); Amit Singhal (ex-Google); Khadim Batti and Amit Sharma (Whatfix); Krish Subramanian and Karthik Srinivasan (Chargebee); Kushal Nahata (FarEye); Ashish Gupta (ex-Junglee, Helion); Niranjan Sivan (Freshworks); Vaidhyanathan B (ex-Zuora, ex-Freshworks) and Niranjan Chavan (Browserstack).
The fresh funds will be used to boost Drivetrain’s product development and expand its go-to-market team.
Drivetrain’s platform helps finance teams build integrated plans, budgets, and forecasts, track their progress against targets, and identify bottlenecks to growth. The platform integrates with over 200 common business tools such as Salesforce, Netsuite, Quickbooks, Workday, and Looker. It also offers features like tracking real-time budgets versus actuals, modelling what-if scenarios, and root cause analysis.
In an interaction with VCCircle Alok Goel, Co-founder and Chief Executive at Drivetrain, said, “With the mid-market and enterprise being our target segment, we engage with customers directly from day one. With over 200 out-of-box connectors, customers start using the software and derive value in two to four weeks. Typical use cases are automated financial reporting, monthly forecasting, revenue planning, sales performance measurements, headcount planning, what-if scenarios, and automated root cause analysis.”
In terms of competition, Goel said, “The enterprise segment has legacy tools like Anaplan and Adaptive with age-old tech, requiring heavy customization and an army of consultants to implement over 6–12 months. Not suited for companies with evolving business models.”
Drivetrain was founded by Goel, Tarkeshwar Thakur and Saurav Bhagat in 2021. Goel, before starting Drivetrain, was a partner at Elevation Capital, "During that over 6 years, I set up the SaaS investment practice, evaluated hundreds of SaaS companies, and served on the boards of many,” he said.
Tarkeshwar Thakur had worked with companies like Freshworks, where he led machine learning and data platform teams. He also founded Chatimity, which was acquired by Freshworks. Earlier, he had worked at Google. While Bhagat was part of the SaaS investment team at Elevation Capital, he worked as a management consultant with A.T. Kearney. Bhagat graduated from IIT-Delhi in 2016.