MindTickle Doubles Valuation With $100 Mn From SoftBank, Others

Sales enablement platform MindTickle has raised $100 Mn in a mix of equity and debt funding led by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Vision Fund II at a valuation of $500 Mn. This is SoftBank India’s first investment in a Software-as-a-Services (SaaS) company.

Existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Canaan, New View Capital and Qualcomm Ventures also participated in this round. It is looking to deploy fresh capital to expand globally and invest in product development.

MindTickle had last raised $40 Mn Series C funding from Norwest Venture Partners, Accel Partners, Canaan, NewView Capital and Qualcomm Ventures. The company was valued at $250 Mn during this round.

MindTickle Boosts Of 180% Growth In FY2020

Founded in 2011 by Krishna Depura, Nishant Mungali, Mohit Garg and Deepak Diwakar, MindTickle is a SaaS platform that focuses on improving the sales function in businesses. The Pune and San Francisco-based company claims to cut training time for salespeople who need to be kept up-to-date on new product lines.

It also offers solutions for onboarding, micro-learning, skills development and coaching to companies that have been using legacy learning management systems (LMS). Its clientele has 200 enterprise companies, including more than 40 Fortune 500 companies. Some of its clients are United Colors of Benetton, Dabur, Symantec, Phillips, Micro Focus, DexCom, Ola Cabs, Cloudera and Nutanix, among others.

MindTickle claims to have seen a 170%-180% growth in revenue in the last one year and expects to close this year with an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $30 Mn to $40 Mn. CEO Depura added that MindTickle’s shift towards using a sales readiness platform has accelerated in the last 8-10 months.

The company’s next focus will be on providing in-depth analytics and introducing more personalised recommendations to sales teams using artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.

SoftBank Plans To Turn Things Around This Year

Commenting on the latest funding, Depura, cofounder and CEO of MindTickle, said, “We believe we’re at the tipping point where we’ve worked hard, the category is getting recognised and created and we can take it beyond one geography or one vertical. It was good timing because SoftBank was looking to get into SaaS businesses and we were also looking at a partner that can completely back us.”

The development comes as Softbank has decided to move away from its overflowing cash infusion strategy to writing smaller cheques. Investment Advisors’ CEO and head of vision fund Rajeev Misra recently said, “We are going early as we want to grow with the company and not be averse to a $30 Mn- $50 Mn funding round… In Vision Fund I, we would not do anything less than $100 Mn but not anymore.”

Besides this, the company has also decided to focus on enterprise, healthtech and SaaS in order to ensure the profitability of the investment firm and expand its offerings. After the blowup of WeWork last year, SoftBank Vision Fund has been in a tough spot.

When WeWork filed for its initial public offering (IPO) filing in the second half of 2019, external investors started questioning the company’s losses, business management, and most of all its “tech” aspect. The company, which was valued at $47 Bn in January 2019, was devalued to $8 Bn and SoftBank had to acquire it as a rescue act.

This led to SoftBank reporting a loss of $17.7 Bn in the fiscal year 2020, this was SoftBank’s first loss in the last 15 years. In the second quarter of FY2021, SoftBank has reported $7.6 Bn in profit for its Vision Fund.