Drivetrain is on a mission to enable businesses to make better decisions. Our financial planning & decision-making platform provides next-generation capabilities for finance teams to plan and work with data.
Today, we’re excited to announce that Drivetrain has raised $15 million in funding from Elevation Capital, Jungle Ventures, and Venture Highway. Over 25 renowned angel investors, advisors, founders, and CXOs of marquee technology companies have participated in this round.
We thank our customers, investors, and the team for their belief in the company. As we celebrate this milestone, here’s a brief recap of our journey so far.
The Beginnings
While working as a Partner at Elevation Capital and evaluating hundreds of SaaS companies, Alok Goel got obsessed with one question: ‘What makes the execution of a company predictable?’ How does a company consistently achieve targets quarter after quarter? Why do some companies grow faster while others get stuck?
Alok noticed a recurring pattern that better run companies were often well-planned and were run with decisions backed by data. Complex businesses like SaaS have this jigsaw nature to them, where pieces need to fall in place at the right time for an outcome to occur later. This requires a systems thinking and a data driven approach.
The existing tools dealing with this problem are either legacy systems built with age-old tech, available only to the top-end Enterprises and requiring tedious implementations. The other alternative is to resort to spreadsheets with their obvious limitations and flaws.
The need is a software that’s a Google Maps for business growth, that helps create plans, tells whether we’re on track and helps course-correct when we veer off.
That’s the idea that led to the birth of Drivetrain.
Alok brought together Tarkeshwar Thakur and Saurav Bhagat to found the company. Tark was VP of engineering at Freshworks leading their data platform and machine learning teams, and earlier was his colleague at Google. Saurav ran the SaaS practice at Elevation Capital with Alok.
And so it began.
The Journey
A small team banded together in April 2021 and started building a prototype while working with a handful of customers. We’ve since assembled a top-notch team with deep expertise in enterprise and consumer technology, strategic finance, data, and product.
Today, our software powers some of the fastest-growing companies in the world. Many category leaders like Mindtickle, Whatfix and FarEye all use Drivetrain to run their financial planning and business monitoring.
We have been a remote-friendly company since the start. Our teams are spread across the US, India, and the UK.
The Product
Drivetrain is an integrated platform for companies to easily connect data from a variety of systems, bring the data to usable form, help them build financial plans, do plan-versus-actual tracking, create what-if scenarios and perform root-cause analysis. This enables finance teams to become a strategic partner to the CEO in making confident data-backed decisions.
Drivetrain’s approach is to knit the planning and monitoring worlds seamlessly together, which makes it a hard problem but with great returns. To do this, we invented a language called DTML – Drivetrain Modeling Language – that is capable of expressing nuances of how a business runs. Every business is a little different and only an immensely flexible system can capture those nuances. Drivetrain offers a familiar spreadsheet-like interface, which is served by a DTML program behind the scenes. This program influences every part of the Drivetrain platform, bringing in the benefits of centralizing data and metric definitions, version control, sandbox and assumption inspections.
This innovative approach coupled with rich integrations and a powerful compute engine makes Drivetrain a compelling platform for planning, data analysis, and decision-making.
The Road Ahead
Our goal is to make Drivetrain the de facto decision-making platform for companies.
Our team is growing and we hope to grow even faster and build a great company. If you are a great engineer, product manager, designer, marketer, or sales person, don’t miss this train. You can explore the open roles and write to us at careers@drivetrain.ai and join the journey.
We’ve only just started. The best is yet to come.
Cheers,
Alok Goel, Tarkeshwar Thakur & Saurav Bhagat
Also seen on
Techcrunch: Drivetrain is the “Google Maps for business growth”
Forbes: Drivetrain Raises $15 Million To Back Its Business Planning Platform
The Economic Times: Drivetrain AI raises $15 million in fresh funding round
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