Drivetrain AI, a next-generation financial planning, monitoring and decision-making platform, 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 including Akshay Kothari (Notion,) Amit Singhal (ex-Google,) Khadim Batti and Amit Sharma (Whatfix,) Krish Subramanian and Karthik Srinivasan (Chargebee,) Kushal Nahata (FarEye.) Ashish Gupta (ex-Junglee, Helion,) Niranjan Sivan (Freshworks,) Vaidhyanathan B (ex-Zuora, ex-Freshworks,) and Niranjan Chavan (Browserstack)  among others. 

Drivetrain, founded in 2021 by Alok Goel, Tarkeshwar Thakur and Saurav Bhagat, will use the funds to accelerate product development and expand its go-to-market team, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.

With only 13% of organisations identifying performance issues before they hit financials per Gartner, timely response is critical. Drivetrain’s platform helps finance teams build integrated plans, budgets and forecasts, track their progress against targets, and identify bottlenecks to growth.

The platform integrates with over 200 common business tools such as Salesforce, Netsuite, Quickbooks, Workday, and Looker. 

Goel, co-founder and CEO of Drivetrain, observed the challenges leaders face in scaling their businesses while serving on the board of several digital-first companies. 

“Drivetrain is like Google Maps for business growth. It helps build plans, informs you whether you’re on track, and simplifies course-correction. Many leaders manage their business plans and multimillion-dollar budgets on spreadsheets that are cumbersome and error-prone. Gauging your business health in real-time and applying course corrections is impossible on spreadsheets. Instead, with Drivetrain, you can make better, confident decisions in days, not months—a key strategic advantage."

Thakur, co-founder and CTO of Drivetrain, says they have designed Drivetrain to be flexible from the ground up. Behind the scenes, the system creates a program for the business that captures all nuances. “This approach centralises metric and data definitions, making versioning, sandbox, and assumption inspections straightforward.”

“Today, finance teams spend up to four weeks every quarter tracking key business metrics and generating reports for their stakeholders. You can’t make decisions on such stale data. Drivetrain enables these companies to consolidate their data and get insights in near real-time. This helps them focus more on forward-looking questions during board meetings,” said Deepak Gaur, partner at Elevation Capital.

“We have struggled to put together Excel sheets for portfolio companies to predict revenue growth, structure the go-to-market plan, and understand levers that would affect revenue and margin growth. Spreadsheets and existing tools fail to do this in real-time,” added Priya Mohan, partner at Venture Highway. “Drivetrain’s scientific approach to scaling business predictably resonated with us. Strong clarity of thought and deep connection to the problem make Alok, Tark and Saurav the perfect founding team to solve this.”

Arpit Beri, principal at Jungle Ventures sees Drivetrain becoming a part of the core financial tech stack for growth-stage companies. “You need a ‘metrics layer’ where you can simulate and implement your growth strategies, answer strategic questions like what they can do to increase revenue or reduce costs, and guide them towards more predictable outcomes. Drivetrain is delivering that today,” Beri said.