A startup that calls itself ‘Google Maps for business growth’ raises $15 million from Elevation Capital and others

• Elevation Capital, Jungle Ventures, Venture Highway, and over 25 angel investors, advisors, founders, and CXOs of marquee technology companies have participated in this round.
  
• Drivetrain will use the funds to accelerate product development and expand its go-to-market team.
  
• The company was founded in 2021 by Alok Goel, Tarkeshwar Thakur and Saurav Bhagat.

Drivetrain AI Incorporated, a financial modelling platform on Wednesday said it raised $15 million in a fresh funding round. Apart from Elevation Capital, Jungle Ventures, and Venture Highway, over 25 angel investors, advisors, founders, and CXOs of marquee technology companies have participated in this round.

Investors Akshay Kothari from software Notion; Khadim Batti and Amit Sharma of SaaS platform Whatfix; Krish Subramanian and Karthik Srinivasan from revenue management company Chargebee; Kushal Nahata of delivery platform FarEye and Niranjan Sivan from software firm Freshworks also participated in the round.

The startup that helps businesses scale and achieve their targets predictably, was founded in 2021 by Alok Goel, Tarkeshwar Thakur and Saurav Bhagat.

“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 spreadsheets that are cumbersome and error-prone. Gauging your business health in real-time and applying course corrections is impossible on spreadsheets," said Goel, co-founder and CEO of Drivetrain.

Drivetrain’s platform helps finance teams build integrated plans, budgets and forecasts, track their progress against targets, and identify bottlenecks to growth. The platform integrates with over 200 common business tools such as Salesforce, Netsuite, Quickbooks, Workday, and Looker.

It will use the funds to accelerate product development and expand its go-to-market team, the company said.

The platform also offers features like tracking real-time budget versus actuals, modelling what-if scenarios, and root cause analysis, to name a few.

“Today, finance teams spend up to four weeks every quarter tracking key business metrics and generating reports for their stakeholders. You can’t make decisions on such stale data,” said Deepak Gaur, Partner at Elevation Capital.

Elevation Capital has been investing in India since 2002 deploying almost $2 billion of capital in over 150 companies.

“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.

Venture Highway is an early-stage investment fund that partners with next-generation technology entrepreneurs building from India.

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