Financial modeling and monitoring platform Drivetrain AI Inc. has raised $15 million (INR 120 crore) in a Series A round led by Elevation Capital, Jungle Ventures and Venture Highway. In addition, angel investors, advisors, founders and CXOs of marquee technological companies also contributed to the financing round.
Akshay Kothari (Notion), former Google executive Amit Singhal, Khadim Batti and Amit Sharma (Co-founders of Whatfix), Krish Subramanian and Karthik Srinivasan (Co-Founders of Chargebee), and Kushal Nahata are among the HNIs who participated in the round (Founder of FarEye).
The funds will be used to expand the go-to-market team and for product development by the US-based startup that helps businesses predictably scale and achieve their goals.
“Drivetrain is like Google Maps for business growth. It helps build plans, informs you whether you’re on track, and simplifies course correction. Many leaders manage their business plans and multimillion-dollar budgets on cumbersome and error-prone spreadsheets. Gauging your business health in real-time and applying course corrections is impossible on spreadsheets,” said Goel, co-founder and CEO of Drivetrain.
The startup assists businesses in scaling and achieving their goals in a predictable manner
Alok Goel (ex-Partner at Elevation Capital), Tarkeshwar Thakur (former VP of Engineering at Freshworks), and Saurav Bhagat founded Drivetrain AI in 2021. (ex-VC of Investments at Elevation Capital).
Before founding Drivetrain, Goel was a partner at Elevation Capital. Tarkeshwar Thakur previously worked for Freshworks, where he led machine learning and data platform teams. Chatimity, which Freshworks acquired, was also founded by him. He previously worked at Google.
Bhagat worked as a management consultant with A.T. Kearney before joining Elevation Capital’s SaaS investment team. In 2016, Bhagat graduated from IIT-Delhi.
“Drivetrain assists in creating plans, informs you whether you’re on track, and simplifies course correction.” “Many leaders manage their business plans and multi-million-dollar budgets on cumbersome and error-prone spreadsheets,” said Alok Goel, Co-founder and CEO of Drivetrain.
“It is impossible to gauge your business’s health in real-time and apply course corrections using spreadsheets.” Instead, with Drivetrain, you can make more confident decisions in days rather than months, which is a significant strategic advantage,” he added.
Drivetrain’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform assists finance teams in creating integrated plans, budgets, and forecasts, tracking progress against targets, and identifying growth bottlenecks. It also includes tracking real-time budgets versus actuals, generating what-if scenarios, and performing root cause analysis. Over 200 common business tools, including Salesforce, Netsuite, Quickbooks, Workday, and Looker, are integrated into the cloud-based SaaS platform.
“We have struggled to put together Excel sheets for portfolio companies to predict revenue growth, structure the go-to-market plan, and understand levers that would affect revenue and margin growth. Spreadsheets and existing tools fail to do this in real-time,” said Priya Mohan, Partner at Venture Highway.
