MindTickle Inc., a platform that trains sales executives, said it has raised $40 million (about Rs 275 crore at current exchange rate) in a Series C funding round led by multi-stage investment firm Norwest Venture Partners.
Other entities that participated in the round include existing investors Accel, Canaan Partners, NewView Capital – a spinout of New Enterprise Associates – and Qualcomm Ventures, MindTickle said in a statement. Norwest is a new investor in San Francisco-headquartered MindTickle.
Norwest partner and former Salesforce executive Scott Beechuk will also join the company’s board of directors as part of the investment. The latest funding takes the total amount raised by MindTickle to over $81 million, the statement said.
MindTickle co-founder and chief executive officer Krishna Depura said the firm will use the capital to further its long-term growth plans as well as invest in its products and services. “MindTickle is empowering companies to grow revenue and build their brand value by transforming customer-facing teams,” Depura said.
Beechuk said MindTickle was being successful in training and upskilling customer-facing employees at organisations, and that it had the potential to be a market leader in the segment.
The company was co-founded by Depura, Mohit Garg, Deepak Diwakar and Nishant Mungali in 2011. Depura, who studied at Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, and Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, has earlier worked with Infenera and PubMatic. Garg, a graduate of ISB and Stanford University, had a stint at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), one of the world's "Big Four" accounting firms. Diwakar and Mungali are IIT alumni.
The Series C funding comes after the company raised $27 million (around Rs 174 crore) in its Series B round in December 2017, which was led by Canaan.
The deal marked the return of the venture capital firm to the Indian market, which had pumped in about $150 million in Indian companies out of its global funds during eight years to June 2014.
MindTickle secured a $12.5 million Series A round in November 2015 from New Enterprise Associates and Accel. It had also got $1.8 million from Accel in 2014.
The company provides a data-driven software-as-a-service platform aimed at making sales teams more productive. It combines micro-learning, social learning and gamification to offer sales-ready solutions, which includes onboarding, skill development and coaching.
