MindTickle Interactive Media Pvt. Ltd, which runs a gamification platform designed to train salespeople, has raised $27 million (Rs 174 crore) in a Series B funding round led by venture capital investor Canaan Partners.
The company’s existing investors, Accel Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Qualcomm Ventures, too, participated in this round.
The fresh capital will be used to accelerate product innovation, besides funding its global expansion plans, MindTickle said in a statement. With this transaction, the company’s total external funding has touched $41.3 million.
As part of the deal, Joydeep Bhattacharyya, a partner at Canaan Partners, will join MindTickle’s board of directors.
The deal also marks the return of Cannan Partners to the Indian market. The venture capital firm, which had pumped in about $150 million in Indian companies out of its global funds during the eight years to June 2014, had last backed an Indian entity in March 2014. Since then, it had been working on its investment strategy for the country.
MindTickle was founded by Krishna Depura, Mohit Garg, Deepak Diwakar and Nishant Mungali in 2012. Depura is an IIT Roorkee and ISB Hyderabad graduate, who had earlier worked with Infenera and PubMatic. Garg, a graduate from ISB and Stanford University, had a stint in PwC. Diwakar and Mungali are IIT alumni.
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform has a data-driven approach to help sales teams more productive. It combines micro-learning, social learning and gamification to offer sales-ready solutions, which includes onboarding, micro-learning, skills development and coaching.
“MindTickle’s comprehensive readiness platform enables companies to be at the forefront of sales excellence through its unique combination of gamification, automation, and a strong analytics framework for correlating learning and performance,†said Depura, the CEO of the company.
Its clients include Symantec, Phillips, Micro Focus, DexCom, Ola, Cloudera, and Nutanix.
MindTickle had secured a $12.5-million Series A round in November 2015 from NEA and existing investor Accel Partners. The startup was earlier funded by senior executives from WhatsApp and Google. It had also got $1.8 million from Accel in October 2014.
“Sales readiness is the single most important metric that every public company CEO is paying attention to, and the best predictor of future performance. MindTickle is the leader in this new area of applications for sales teams, with tremendous customer adoption,†said Canaan Partners’s Bhattacharyya.
