The first Mindtickle product was a game. In 2011, Krishna Depura and his co-founders ran online treasure hunts that used competition to keep employees engaged. Nothing about it suggested a billion-dollar company.
Depura had met his co-founders, Nishant Mungali, Mohit Garg and Deepak Diwakar, back in 2006. They had five years of friendship and shared ideas before they sold anything.
They built the product before they had defined the customer's problem, and they under-invested in marketing and education.
The treasure hunts worked as engagement tools, but they were a thin business. The founders then saw that the same approach could help new hires settle in. That covered only the early stretch of an employee's life at a company. The next step, and the one that stuck, was sales readiness: training, coaching and productivity tools for sales reps, with a way to measure whether any of it worked.
Mistakes came along the way. In a 2022 interview with Entrepreneur India, the founders admitted two. They built the product before they had defined the customer's problem, and they under-invested in marketing and education. A mentor also warned them that serving only technology companies would cap their growth. They went after pharma and insurance, and then Fortune 100 and 500 customers.
The pandemic helped. Remote work and digital transformation pushed companies to train sales teams online. In August 2021 SoftBank led a $100 million Series E that valued Mindtickle at $1.2 billion. Depura told Entrepreneur India the unicorn label was 'a byproduct of everything.' G2 ranked it the top enterprise product in its category for two years running, and it was hiring across the US, Canada, the UK and India with plans for Europe, the Middle East and Australia.
The business has offices in Pune and San Francisco and hopes to stretch readiness beyond sales to every customer-facing team.
The useful thing about Mindtickle is how unglamorous the path was: a game, then onboarding, then sales readiness. Depura described the pivots as reflections of changing markets, technology and customer needs. A first-time founder should read that as permission. The first idea is often the doorway, and the real company is in the room next door.