Sales Hiring Startup Scooter Raises Rs 1.5 Crore Pre-Seed Round, Bets on Sales Skills Over CVs
Pune-based sales hiring startup Scooter has raised Rs 1.5 crore in a pre-seed funding round led by Aviral Bhatnagar's AJVC, marking the pre-seed fund's very first investment in a Pune-headquartered startup.
Here's the problem Scooter is actually solving. Sales hiring is notoriously time-consuming for early-stage companies, recruiters and hiring managers often sift through large candidate pools before reaching anything close to a meaningful shortlist, and traditional CV-first screening doesn't really tell you whether someone can actually sell. Scooter flips that approach entirely, it sources verified sales professionals, evaluates them through real sales scenarios rather than resumes, and then hands hiring managers a curated shortlist of just three to five candidates, complete with short video clips from the assessments that managers can review before even looking at a CV.
The traction so far is genuinely promising for such an early round. One customer completed a full sales hire through the platform in just six days, Scooter already works with more than 50 companies, having added 14 new customers in recent months, and it has built a verified pool of over 10,000 sales candidates.
The founder story adds credibility here. Scooter was founded in 2024 by Kartik Mandrekar and Saumya Seth, with Mandrekar bringing direct sales leadership experience from companies including Gartner and Shoptimize, exactly the kind of hands-on sales hiring pain he's now building a product to solve.
The fresh capital has a clear, focused purpose. Scooter plans to use the funds to strengthen its product and further simplify the sales hiring process for both candidates and hiring managers, rather than spreading thin across multiple initiatives at this early stage.
From sifting through endless resumes to watching real sales pitches in action, Scooter's bet is that how someone sells matters far more than how their CV reads.
#StartupNews #Scooter #SalesHiring #HRTech #PreSeed #IndianStartups #AJVC
— 𝔖𝔞𝔫𝔡𝔢𝔢𝔭 ℜ𝔞𝔦𝔷𝔞