Drivetrain AI, Inc., an India-based financial planning, monitoring and decision-making platform, announced Wednesday that it has raised $15 million in funding from Elevation Capital, Jungle Ventures, and Venture Highway.
Over 25 renowned angel investors, advisors, founders, and chief experience officers (CXOs) of marquee technology companies have also participated in this round, Drivetrain said in a statement.
According to the statement, the firm will use the funds to accelerate product development and expand its go-to-market team.
Drivetrain helps businesses scale and achieve their targets predictably. Its 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.
Built as a ‘system of metrics’ defined using simple English formulas, Drivetrain enables companies to build easy-to-understand financial models simplifying business performance measurement and visualization.
The platform offers a host of features like tracking real-time budget versus actuals, modeling what-if scenarios, and root cause analysis, to name a few.
Alok Goel, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Drivetrain, observed the challenges leaders face in scaling their businesses while serving on the board of several digital-first companies.
“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. Instead, with Drivetrain, you can make better, confident decisions in days, not months—a key strategic advantage,” he added.
Meanwhile, Drivetrain Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Tarkeshwar Thakur said :”Every business is a little different. We’ve designed Drivetrain to be flexible from the ground up.”
“Behind the scenes, the system creates a program for the business that captures all nuances. This approach centralizes metric and data definitions, making versioning, sandbox, and assumption inspections straightforward,
“Coupled with rich integrations and a powerful compute engine, Drivetrain is an ideal platform for planning, data analysis, and decision-making,” he added.
The observations and approach of the founders resonated with investors at Elevation Capital, Jungle Ventures and Venture Highway, all of whom have experienced similar pain points with their portfolio companies.
“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,
“Drivetrain enables these companies to consolidate their data and get insights in near real-time. This helps them focus more on forward-looking questions during board meetings,” said Deepak Gaur, Partner at Elevation Capital.
Venture Highway Partner Priya Mohan said :”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.”
“Drivetrain’s scientific approach to scaling business predictably resonated with us. Strong clarity of thought and deep connection to the problem make Alok, Tark and Saurav the perfect founding team to solve this,” she added.
Jungle Ventures Principal Arpit Beri said he sees Drivetrain becoming a part of the core financial tech stack for growth-stage companies.
“You need a ‘metrics layer’ where you can simulate and implement your growth strategies, answer strategic questions like what they can do to increase revenue or reduce costs, and guide them towards more predictable outcomes. Drivetrain is delivering that today,” he added.
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