India's MindTickle closes $100m Series E

The investment makes MindTickle India’s 20th unicorn of 2021 and third in the space of a week. SoftBank also took the lead in a $160 million Series E for B2B industrial supply chain specialist OfBusiness, while Tiger Global Management played the same role in a $370 million Series E for payments player BharatPe. The valuations were $1.5 billion and $2.85 billion, respectively.

SoftBank and Tiger Global are among the most active investors in a surge of growth-stage activity in India. Expectations of more domestic IPOs are a key contributing factor.

MindTickle has raised $281 million to date, including a $100 million Series D last November that was also led by SoftBank. Norwest Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, NewView Capital, and Qualcomm Ventures were among the other participants in both the Series D and E rounds.

The company was founded in 2011 by Nishant Mungali. Krishna Depura, and Deepak Diwakar (pictured, left to right). With headquarters in San Francisco and an operations team in India, it provides a variety of training programs for sales representatives – the goal being to engage them by “tickling” their minds to help them improve performance, while providing data insights to managers.

MindTickle’s offering is rooted in a suite of services such as content management, conversation intelligence, performance analytics, and coaching solutions. Customers include Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Splunk, Snowflake, AppDynamics, Wipro, and Juniper Networks.

The company claims that corporates are looking to invest more in sales readiness to arrest a decline in average sales quota attainment. Among S&P 500 businesses, it has fallen from 63% to 43% over the past decade. The sales enablement technology market is projected to be worth $4.23 billion by 2027, while the broader conversation intelligence category will hit $13 billion by 2025.

“Revenue leaders understand that sales readiness is a mission-critical component of their strategy to consistently meet or exceed their goals,” Depura said in a statement. “They are taking more square ownership of these programs, and partnering with their sales enablement, revenue operations, and training teams to create a continuous state of excellence across their organizations.”

Sumer Juneja, a partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, added that MindTickle had delivered ahead of plan across all metrics since the Series D round. He highlighted the progress made on customer additions, contract expansions, and new product launches and acceptance.

Accel Partners was MindTickle’s first institutional investor, providing a $1.8 million seed round in 2014, according to AVCJ Research’s records.

It re-upped in the next three rounds: a $12.5 million Series A featuring New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Qualcomm; a $27 million Series B in 2017 supported by all existing investors plus Canaan; and a $40 million Series C in 2019 led by Norwest, with participation from Canaan, Qualcomm, and NewView. NewView is a spinout from NEA.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Expansion
• Technology
• India
• Softbank
• enterprise software
• Growth capital
• Canaan Partners
• Norwest Venture Partners
• Qualcomm Ventures
• NewView Capital