MindTickle Secures $12.5M Series A Funding from NEA and Accel Partners

San Francisco, CA, November 20, 2015 --(PR.com)-- MindTickle, the leading sales readiness platform, announced today that it has received a $12.5 Million Series A funding from NEA and and existing investor Accel Partners. NEA’s Ravi Viswanathan will be joining the MindTickle board.

"The marketing technology stack has been well established in the last decade, and now the sales technology stack is in the process of getting defined. MindTickle has uniquely positioned itself in this stack by taking product leadership in the sales readiness space," said Ravi Viswanathan, General Partner, NEA. "While a number of players in the sales productivity space are working on driving up efficiency of sales activities, MindTickle is focusing on making sales teams more effective - helping new reps ramp faster and tenured reps stay on top of their game. We were impressed with the number and quality of customers that MindTickle has signed up in less than a year. MindTickle is a great example of category defining company that we like to invest in."

MindTickle plans to use the new investment to build upon its early successes in combining gamification, mobile delivery and data science to improve the engagement and performance of direct and channel sales teams. This includes continued development of its innovative workflows for onboarding, coaching and ongoing enablement of customer facing teams. In conjunction, the company is scaling out its robust API framework that customers and partners can leverage to derive more meaningful insights across the entire sales organization.

"MindTickle is being viewed as a strategic investment and source of competitive advantage for our customers," said Krishna Depura, CEO of MindTickle. "Our technology is enabling hyper-growth companies deliver on ambitious growth targets by driving up sales productivity. Established companies with large sales teams are benefiting from the ability to keep the field teams up to date with real-time updates on mobile devices, and improving the performance of their insides sales teams through audio/video role-play and scenario based training on MindTickle. We have worked with several anchor customers and analyzed thousands of datasets to fine-tune the sales enablement workflows that help improve sales metrics. Our next frontier is to provide dashboard and analytics that correlate learning performance with sales performance."

Today, high-growth tech companies such as Nutanix, Cloudera, AppDynamics and Qualtrics are leveraging the MindTickle’s sales readiness platform to improve the performance of all customer facing staff – from onboarding new sales reps to coaching the sales team through role plays and keeping reps up-to-date on latest information on product, competition and success stories.

“Enterprise-selling is changing dramatically, as the cloud consumption model introduces consumer-grade techniques that are increasingly 1-click and API-driven,” says Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix. “Our products are changing rapidly, as we keep pace with our customers' demands and a dramatically shifting competitive landscape. Sales enablement must adapt to become high-velocity, bite-sized, fun, mobile-friendly, and social. MindTickle is a revolution, and takes an outsider’s view to learning in the enterprise. They will disrupt a large industry, if they focus on being a system of engagement, not just a boring system of record that certifications used to be,” he added.

In addition to providing a highly engaging and millennial-friendly user experience, the MindTickle platform offers very strong management capabilities. MindTickle’s highly intuitive administrative interface enables product and marketing teams to publish new updates, assessments/surveys and role-play coaching exercises in matter of minutes. For the sales leaders, MindTickle provides insightful reports and dashboard that help identify knowledge gaps for each rep and the summary views help track the sales readiness by region, team or user cohort. MindTickle integrates seamlessly with Salesforce.comTM that eliminates the need for a separate username and password, and the administrators are able to assign learning paths and slice and dice data based on the CRM profile fields.

“As our sales team grew rapidly across the world, enabling newly hired and existing sales representatives got harder and harder,” said Jyoti Bansal, Founder and Chairman of AppDynamics. “We tried traditional methods such as classroom training and learning management systems, but those approaches lacked agility and user engagement that is needed for a modern sales force. MindTickle has immensely scaled our ability to keep our distributed and fast growing sales team on top of the latest product features, sales processes, competitive intelligence and success stories. We have seen a meaningful change in ramp-up time for new sales representatives since we implemented MindTickle, and our sales force loves the productivity and flexibility they have gained.”

About MindTickle:

MindTickle is a next-generation sales readiness platform, recognized as one of the most promising TiE 50 tech startups in 2015 and a “Cool Vendor” by Gartner in 2014. The SaaS platform combines learning best practices such as micro-learning, social learning, gamification, mobile, etc. with a data-driven approach to make the sales and customer success departments more productive.

MindTickle puts the power of sales readiness into the hands of the sales teams themselves. Companies can share resources like pitches, presentation decks and product updates in real-time. That means companies can keep their sales reps up-to-date on the latest product features, objection handling and customer success stories. Plus, MindTickle sales readiness employs unique social tools and gamification to tap into sales teams’ inner competitiveness and dramatically improve usage rates. As a result, MindTickle has consistently demonstrated end-user engagement of more than 90 percent.

MindTickle has been deployed by 100+ companies and has over 150K users. MindTickle is funded by NEA and Accel Partners, with angel investment from senior execs of WhatsApp and Google. MindTickle has a global sales presence with headquarters in the SF Bay Area and development/operations team in India.