MindTickle raises $12.5M from NEA, Accel

MindTickle Interactive Media Pvt Ltd, which runs a gamification platform to train salespeople, has raised $12.5 million (about Rs 82.5 crore) in Series A funding from New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and existing investor Accel Partners.

As part of the transaction, NEA general partner Ravi Viswanathan will join the board of the California- and Pune-based startup.

MindTickle will use the funds to improve the performance of its direct and channel sales teams, among other initiatives.

"While a number of players in the sales productivity space are working on driving up efficiency of sales activities, MindTickle is focussing on making sales teams more effective - helping new reps ramp faster and tenured reps stay on top of their game," said Viswanathan.

The company was founded by Krishna Depura, Mohit Garg, Deepak Diwakar and Nishant Mungali in 2012. Depura is an IIT Roorkee and ISB Hyderabad graduate who earlier worked with Infenera and PubMatic. Garg is a graduate from ISB and Stanford University and previously worked with PwC. Diwakar and Mungali are also IIT alumni.

The startup was earlier funded by senior executives from WhatsApp and Google. It also got $1.8 million in funding from Accel in October 2014.

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform combines micro-learning, social learning and gamification with a data-driven approach to make the sales teams more productive. The company claims its platform has more than 150,000 users. Its clients include tech companies such as Nutanix, Cloudera, AppDynamics and Qualtrics.

Depura, who is also CEO, said MindTickle aims to provide dashboard and analytics that correlate learning performance with sales performance.

MindTickle's global competitors are CommercialTribe, Allego, Learncore and Insidesales.com.

For NEA, MindTickle is the latest addition to its portfolio. NEA raised $3.1 billion early this year across its new flagship fund and an associated 'opportunity fund'. It has already invested in half-a-dozen Indian firms since January, many being additions to its portfolio. It recently put money in analytics startup for retailers IntelligenceNODE Consulting Pvt Ltd and verification services platform IDfy.com.

NEA has a broad strategy and invests from seed to growth equity stage, but its Indian investments have been mostly at the mid-stage VC investment stage. It is looking to come in as an early-stage investor as part of its tweaked investment strategy.