“Growing a business is like completing a jigsaw puzzle, and if you miss a piece, you fall short,” said Alok Goel, the co-founder and CEO of Drivetrain. Goel and his team claim that Driveannouncing a $15 million funding round today will help companies avoid falling into that trap — thus completing the picture and unlocking their potential.
Drivetrain is a cloud-based software-as-a-service application designed to make it easier for businesses to plan their execution strategies and monitor their performance against their goals. It pulls data from the company’s existing tools — it can integrate 200 different tools, ranging from Excel spreadsheets to applications like Salesforce — to provide a single view of where the company is now, where it’s going, and what’s going on. is needed along the way.
“Think of us as Google Maps for business,” adds Goel. “If you’re in an unfamiliar location, Google Maps will tell you how to get to your destination, track your journey, and help get you back on track if you make a mistake; Drivetrain does the same for your business.”
The company considers its customer base to be any company that has found its market position and has proven to have a product or service that customers want to buy; the talent for such companies, then, is to grow rapidly, maximize customer reach and identify new opportunities, while managing cash flow and staying on track to achieve key goals.
Drivetrain’s role in this, Goel argues, is to provide a simple set of data on which the company can base its decisions. It gives management teams a clear view of where they are now, plus the ability to model the impact of any number of decisions aimed at moving the company toward its goals. Once a decision is made, Drivetrain continuously monitors the effects to identify any discrepancies between the actual results and what was hoped for. Where there is a gap, it can help managers catch up.
Part of its appeal, explains Drivetrain CTO and co-founder Tarkeshwar Thakur, is the personalization it offers. “Every company is a little different,” he says. “We designed Drivetrain to be flexible from the ground up. Behind the scenes, the system creates a program for the company that captures all the nuances.”
The bottom line for Goel and Thakur is that companies should refrain from making instinctive decisions based on gut feelings; rather, any choice the company makes should be based on the data it has at its disposal.
Many companies agree, but find it difficult in practice to use their data – which is stored in multiple systems across the company – to drive more scientific decision-making processes. “The key is that no data in the company should be left untouched,” Goel added.
Independent research points in the same direction. For example, Gartner has published statistics warning that only 13% of organizations can identify performance issues before they begin to have an impact on financial metrics. That reflects the inability to leverage data at an early stage.
Drivetrain’s proposal is based on Goel’s experience as a partner at Elevation Capital, where he tracked more than 1,000 potential investments as a venture capitalist. Over time, he became more and more interested in the common denominators of companies executing their plans in a predictable and successful manner – the striking similarity was their ability to plan well and base decisions on data.
That inspired the launch of Drivetrain in April 2021 when Goel, Thakur and a small team started developing a prototype of the current platform. Since then, the company has expanded to 35 employees and started commercializing its software three months ago.
Now that commercialization process appears to be accelerating, with Elevation Capital, Jungle Ventures and Venture Highway — plus a group of 25 angel investors, advisors and founders — injecting $15 million into the company.
“I see Drivetrain becoming part of the core financial technology for growth-stage businesses,” explains Arpit Beri, Principal at Jungle Ventures. “You need a metric layer where you can simulate and implement your growth strategies, answer strategic questions like what you can do to increase revenue or reduce costs, and guide you to more predictable results.”
The money raised is intended for two types of bets, says Goel. “This is one of those products where development will never stop, so we need more resources to help us deepen the product,” he says. “In addition, we need to invest in go-to-market – we turned our heads down to build the project and now we need more help with sales, marketing and content.”
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