Emerging Indian Saas Leaders: Mindtickle's Krishna Depura, Deepak Diwakar, Mohit Garg and Nishant Mungali

By Harichandan Arakali| May 13, 2022

Mindtickle has evolved from a treasure hunt organiser to a cloud-based sales readiness platform provider that is now valued at $1.2 billion. But the original philosophy of combining fun with something insightful and more serious remains

[CAPTION](From left) Mindtickle Chief Product Officer Nishant Mungali, CEO Krishna Depura and CTO Deepak Diwakar[/CAPTION]

It’s been a decade-long, pivot-full journey for Mindtickle—from a treasure hunt organiser to a cloud-based sales readiness platform provider that is now valued at $1.2 billion. But the original philosophy of combining fun with something insightful and more serious remains. It’s reflected in the name as well.

_RSS_ Mindtickle came into its own over the last few years, as it succeeded in finding large customers in the US, while tapping the software engineering talent in India.

Today, Mindtickle’s products are used by more than 2,000 enterprise customers, including Cipla, Unisys, MongoDB, Nutanix, Cloudera, and Merck. Among the company’s most recent additions to its platform are sales coaching rooms to help sales managers become more effective in coaching their frontline sales representatives.

For those in the thick of it, the value is apparent, because the rate of churn of sales representatives is an important challenge for any business that relies on such a process for a big chunk of its revenues. Voluntary sales representatives’ departures at technology and software companies, for example, stood at 67 percent, data analytics company Xactly, found, in a survey of 2,000 sales and revenue respondents, the results of which it published in August 2021.

In a small example of Mindtickle’s many features, “Our platform can create scenarios that can help you succeed in the market,” CEO Depura had told Forbes India after the company became a unicorn. “When you want to talk to your first customer or send your first email or do a demo, our AI software will give you a scenario to practice not once, but many times.”

Depura had worked in ventures like Tejas Networks and Infinera, which went on to become listed companies.

At Mindtickle, he and his co-founders are well on their way to creating their own impactful business—that philosophy hasn’t changed, through all the pivots.