MindTickle, a sales enablement solutions provider with offices in Pune and San Francisco, today announced that it’s raised $40 million in series C funding led by Norwest Venture Partners, bringing its total raised to more than $81 million. The round saw participation from existing investors including Accel Partners, Cannan Partners, NewView Capital (a spinout of New Enterprise Associates), and Qualcomm Ventures, and it follows on the heels of a $27 million series B raise in December 2017.
It’s been something of a banner year for MindTickle, which notched a 100% year-over-year increase in recurring revenue driven by a 200% uptick in customer acquisitions. It now counts among its customer base several Fortune 500 and Global 2000 clients, including Square, Sumo Logic, Ola Cabs, Cloudera, MongoDB, Appdynamics, Qualtrics, Procore, MuleSoft, and Appier.
“Sales and service organizations are facing a perfect storm on many fronts and company representatives that are not equipped to handle complex buyer needs and competitive challenges are being left behind,” said CEO Krishna Depura, who cofounded the company in 2011 with Deepak Diwakar, Mohit Garg, and Nishant Mungali. “MindTickle is empowering companies to grow revenue and build their brand value by transforming customer-facing teams preparing them to be on message and on task every time they engage with a prospect or customer. Our series C funding will fuel our strategic, long-term growth plans while supporting ongoing investment in our expanding products and services.”
MindTickle’s eponymous platform addresses sales onboarding and continuous education with simulated scenarios, automated learning paths, structured coaching programs, and bite-sized quizzes and polls. It gamifies lessons and skill-building activities with points, badges, certifications, and leaderboards, which it relays to a backend dashboard that spots potential knowledge gaps. On the admin side, MindTickle facilitates the development of competency maps that identify problem areas and automatically assigns training based on results. And it tracks real-time engagement and readiness while delivering personalized feedback to reps as they progress through course materials.
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MindTickle adopts a hybrid approach to integration with existing systems, which entails a homegrown integration service and an OEM-sourced integration platform as a service. That’s all to say it plays nicely with any identity provider that supports SAML 2.0, OpenId, Google, or JWT protocols, including Salesforce, OneLogin, Active Directory, Google, and IBM Cloud Identity Connect. On the content, reporting, calendaring, and customer relationship management side of the equation, it works with solutions like Slack, Excel, Tableau, Salesforce, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, YouTube, Vimeo, SlideShare, and OneDrive. And for customers with more bespoke setups and workflows, MindTickle offers an API to enable custom connectivity with third-party systems.
MindTickle competes in a sales enablement market that’s anticipated to be worth $2.6 billion by 2024, according to Markets and Markets, and it’s not the only heavyweight. Seismic raised $100 million last December to build out its automated sales and marketing enablement suite, and Highspot nabbed $60 million in June for a sales enablement toolset that taps AI to power features like semantic search. In June, Showpad secured $70 million for its cloud-based sales tools, and in April, Outreach raked in a cool $114 million to develop further its semiautomated sales engagement software.
But investors like Norwest Venture Partners’ Scott Beechuk believe there’s an abundance of customers ripe for acquisition — and they might be right. In September, Forrester Research reported that 54% of companies have or are in the process of implementing a sales enablement technology, with an additional 19% planning to do so or considering doing so in the next 12 to 18 months. The percent of organizations with a dedicated sales enablement person, program, or function nearly doubled between 2016 and 2018, according to CSO Insights. Moreover, Gartner predicts that by 2021, a full 15% of all sales technology spending will be set aside for sales enablement technology.
“MindTickle is successfully confronting one of the most complex issues facing today’s organizations — the ability to train and upskill customer-facing employees,” said Norwest Venture Partners partner Scott Beechuk, who plans to join the company’s board of directors. “MindTickle has proven product-market fit for its mobile-first readiness platform that engages employees and delivers perpetual micro-learning experiences. As organizations continue to look beyond traditional learning management systems for new technologies to make their teams more effective in the field, we see a tremendous opportunity ahead for MindTickle to lead this movement.”
