Softbank leads $100 million investment in MindTickle to grow its sales readiness platform

Last week, we wrote about SoftBank after the Japanese giant led a $250 million investment in Germany’s e-scooter rental startup Tier Mobility. That was its first foray into the $18.6 billion electric scooter market. Now, SoftBank is back at investing in promising technology startups.

Today, MindTickle, a San Francisco-based tech startup that offers sales readiness solutions for closing knowledge and skill gaps in customer-facing teams, announced it has raised $100 million in new funding led by Softbank Vision Fund 2, with participation from existing investors including Norwest Venture Partners, Canaan, NewView Capital, and Qualcomm Ventures.

MindTickle said it will use the capital infusion to accelerate MindTickle’s go-to-market activities and expansion of global operations while advancing investments in product innovation to close the loop on customer-facing readiness and in-field execution.

Founded in 2011 by Deepak Diwakar, Krishna Depura, Mohit Garg, and Nishant Mungali, MindTickle’s SaaS platform enables enterprises to ready their customer-facing teams for the “moment of truth” — when they interact with their customers. Organizations use MindTickle to drive programs, such as onboarding, ongoing learning, role-playing, upskilling and coaching to ensure that all customer-facing employees have the right capabilities and behaviors needed to drive revenue growth.

MindTickle’s platform is used by more than 200 enterprises, including more than 40 of the Fortune 500 and Forbes Global 2000, have achieved significant, measurable improvement in revenue metrics, such as ramp time, quota attainment, and win rate.

“Our mission is to help companies transform the capabilities and behaviors of their teams to generate a meaningful, measurable impact on their revenue and brand,” said Krishna Depura, co-founder and CEO of MindTickle. “As customers become increasingly demanding and remote work becomes more common, organizations realize the need to reskill and upskill their employees on an ongoing basis to deliver value in each customer interaction. As a result, we have witnessed strong demand and usage growth from enterprise sales teams over the last few quarters. Interestingly, we are also seeing a strong flow of interest from other enterprise teams, who are intrigued by the success of their sales-peers with MindTickle, and are choosing to adopt this new technology for their respective functions.”

Combining-demand online training, bite-sized mobile updates, gamification, coaching, and role-play with a data-driven approach, MindTickle accelerates time-to-productivity, ensures consistent execution, and helps boost sales performance. Companies leveraging MindTickle for sales enablement to assess and certify the readiness of each rep see bigger deal sizes, higher win rates, and reduced sales cycles.

“We have been impressed by MindTickle’s vision of closing the capability loop and bringing deep insights and actionable intelligence to revenue and business leaders,” said Munish Varma, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. “We believe that Sales Readiness is experiencing a paradigm shift, as enterprises face the new reality of hybrid-remote work.”