Pune-based sales-hiring startup Scooter has raised ₹1.5 crore in a pre-seed round led by Aviral Bhatnagar's AJVC — the early-stage fund's first investment in a Pune-based startup.
Founded in 2024 by Kartik Mandrekar and Saumya Seth, Scooter is rebuilding sales hiring around demonstrated ability rather than resumes. Candidates are assessed through real-world sales scenarios; hiring managers get a shortlist of three to five vetted candidates and can review short video clips from the assessments before ever opening a CV.
The numbers so far: more than 50 companies on the platform, a candidate pool of over 10,000 sales professionals, and one customer that completed a sales hire in six days. The startup plans to use the fresh capital to strengthen its product and make sales hiring faster for both candidates and hiring managers.
The founders bring complementary backgrounds. Mandrekar has previously led sales teams at Gartner, Shoptimize and Graas, while Seth is a behavioural scientist with a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania — a mix of operator instinct and assessment science.
Sales hiring is one of the messiest parts of early-stage building: recruiters often sift through huge candidate pools before reaching a meaningful shortlist. Scooter is betting that putting performance in simulated scenarios ahead of the resume compresses that funnel, and the customers added in recent months suggest the thesis is finding takers.
Why it matters for founders
For founders struggling with sales hires, the lesson is the hiring bar itself — test for the job, not the CV. Scooter's traction shows startups will pay for a process that delivers a shortlist in days, not weeks. And AJVC backing two pre-seed rounds in a week is a reminder that small, thesis-driven cheques are moving fast in this market.