MindTickle is the third SaaS firm from India to enter the unicorn club in 2021

• This is SoftBank’s second bet in MindTickle, which helps enterprises improve their sales.
• MindTickle will use this funding to expand its presence, acquire companies and hire aggressively.
• The company has over 200 clients across the globe, including Dabur, Johnson & Johnson, Wipro

MindTickle, a startup that helps small and large enterprises improve their sales, is the latest entrant to India's unicorn club. The decade old startup on Thursday, August 8, announced a $100 million Series E funding round led by existing investor SoftBank, at a valuation of $1.2 billion.

Existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Canaan, NewView Capital, and Qualcomm Ventures also participated in the Series E round.

This makes MindTickle the third Indian software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup to become a unicorn in 2021, after Chargebee and BrowserStack. Overall, there are over nine venture capital (VC) funded SaaS unicorns in India.

A unicorn is a privately valued company with a valuation of over $1 billion.


MindTickle wants to gain greater momentum in international markets

MindTickle was founded by Krishna Depura, Mohit Garg, Deepak Diwakar and Nishant Mungali in 2011. It helps companies build sales capabilities. It also offers solutions for onboarding, micro-learning and skills development.

MindTickle plans to use this funding to expand its presence in multiple verticals as well as markets like Europe and Asia. A part of the funding would also be used to acquire more companies and expand their technology stack, MindTickle’s chief executive officer (CEO) and cofounder Depura told Business Insider.

“So a reasonable chunk of [the] money will go into global expansions, getting into more territories and geographies. The second amount [sic] will go into R&D [research and development], which we’ll use to develop our stack. I think $100 million is a lot of money and it’s not like we’ll deploy the money in the next six months or one year. But it’ll give us sufficient power to plan for the next three-four years to set up our base and continue to think over the horizon,” Depura added.

He also highlighted that the company has a good presence in India at the moment, especially in the automotive and pharmaceutical sectors.

MindTickle will also use a part of the funding to go aggressive on hiring across geographies and functions. It has already hired over 100 employees in 2021 and has openings for 115 positions. The company has a workforce of 500 employees.

MindTickle’s current clientele has already set its global presence

This is SoftBank’s second investment in the Pune and San Francisco-based startup. The Japanese conglomerate had previously led MindTickle’s $100 million round raised in November 2020. Existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Accel Partners, Canaan, NEA, NewView Capital, and Qualcomm Ventures had also participated in the round.

The SaaS startup has raised over $281 million to date.

Its clientele includes 200 enterprise companies like Johnson & Johnson, Splunk, Wipro, Ola, Cloudera, Dabur and United Colors of Benetton. Its customer base includes a few dozen Fortune 500 and Forbes Global 2000 companies, which is an annual ranking of the top corporations worldwide measured by revenue.

MindTickle claims to have presence in over 115 countries as its clientele has subsidiaries across the world.

“We continue to be impressed by Mindtickle’s performance in creating and becoming a category leader in the sales readiness space. The product has become an essential part of any sales organisation and we are excited to support the company in its growth,” Munish Varma, managing partner with SoftBank Investment Advisers, said.

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