Drivetrain is the “Google Maps for enterprise progress” • TechCrunch

Companies normally plot their progress methods on spreadsheets, however Drivetrain desires to offer a quicker various for monetary planning and choice making. The startup, which calls itself “Google Maps for enterprise progress,” introduced in the present day that it has raised $15 million from Elevation Capital, Jungle Ventures and Enterprise Freeway, plus 25 angel traders.

One in every of Drivetrain’s targets is to assist corporations determine efficiency points earlier than it impacts their funds. It integrates with 200 enterprise instruments, together with Salesforce, Netsuite, Quickbooks, Workday and Looker, and delivers a “system of metrics” in easy formulation, to assist corporations create monetary fashions and visualizations.

Drivetrain presently focuses on finance groups at mid-market and enterprise B2B tech companies. CEO Alok Goel, co-founded Drivetrain with CTO Tarkeshwar Thakur, was previously a accomplice at Elevation Capital, which has $670 million belongings below administration. Throughout his six years on the agency, Goel evaluated a whole bunch of SaaS corporations and served on a lot of their boards.

“One query that fascinated me was ‘what makes the execution of an organization predictable’? How does an organization constantly obtain targets quarter after quarter? Why do some corporations develop quicker whereas others get caught?” he mentioned.

He noticed that top-performing corporations used knowledge of their choice making. “Basically as a result of complicated companies like SaaS have this jigsaw nature to them, the place items have to fall in place on the proper time for an end result to happen later,” Goel added. “This requires a techniques considering and an information pushed method.”

By connecting to completely different software program, Drivetrain is ready to mixture knowledge and make it simpler for groups to know, aiding them as they create monetary plans, do plan-versus-actual monitoring, create what-if situations and carry out root trigger evaluation. To try this, Drivetrain created a language known as DTML (Drivetrain Modeling Language), or packages that seize how companies are run in an easy-to-understand spreadsheet consumer interface.

One in every of its shoppers, Airmeet, used Drivetrain to chop down on the time it spent exporting and consolidating knowledge throughout its Quickbooks accounts, Excel information and Chargebee knowledge. By automating its monetary reporting and month-to-month forecasting, Airtrain was capable of make its monetary knowledge and enterprise metrics accessible to everybody, growing collaboration as a result of groups not needed to look forward to month-to-month stories from the finance crew.

Drivetrain’s crew

One other shopper, MindTickle, used Drivetrain to automate knowledge gathering and consolidation for its gross sales, advertising and marketing and income operations groups. This makes correct numbers accessible always, and means workers not must undergo reams of particular person spreadsheets.

There are legacy instruments like Anaplan and Adaptive for enterprise customers, however Goel says they require heavy customization and consultants to implement over a 6 to 12 months interval. Drivetrain improves on the method by integrating shortly with ERPs, CRMs, advertising and marketing software program and HRIS. Goel says it’s normally prepared to make use of in two to 4 weeks, with prospects increasing into new use circumstances, like gross sales efficiency administration, headcount planning and what-if situations, after they get a deal with on its planning and monitoring modules.

In a ready assertion, Enterprise Freeway accomplice Priya Mohan mentioned, “We’ve struggled to place collectively Excel sheets for portfolio corporations to foretell income progress, construction the go-to-market plan, and perceive levers that might have an effect on income and margin progress. Spreadsheets and current instruments fail to do that in real-time. Drivetrain’s scientific method to scaling enterprise predictably resonated with us.”