Sales hiring startup Scooter raises Rs 1.5 Cr pre-seed round

## Scooter Lands Pre-Seed Backing to Rewire Sales Hiring in India A Pune-based startup is betting that the CV has long overstayed its welcome in sales recruitment. Scooter, founded in 2024 by Kartik Mandrekar and Saumya Seth, has raised Rs 1.5 crore (approximately $180,000) in a pre-seed round led by AJVC, the early-stage fund managed by Aviral Bhatnagar — marking AJVC's first investment in a Pune-headquartered company.

### The Problem Scooter Is Solving Hiring for sales roles has historically leaned heavily on résumés and unstructured interviews, two filters that research in behavioural science consistently shows are poor predictors of on-the-job performance. Scooter's platform attempts to flip that dynamic. Rather than starting with a CV, the company sources verified sales professionals, evaluates them through simulated, real-world sales scenarios, and surfaces a curated shortlist of three to five candidates to the hiring manager — complete with short video clips from each candidate's assessment. The CV becomes a secondary data point, not the first.

According to Entrackr, one customer completed a sales hire through Scooter in just six days.

### Founder Credentials Mandrekar brings operational credibility to the proposition: he has previously led sales teams at Gartner, Shoptimize, and Graas, giving him firsthand insight into the friction companies face when filling revenue-generating roles. His co-founder Seth is a behavioural scientist holding a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania — a background that lends academic grounding to the scenario-based assessment methodology at the core of the product.

### Early Traction Despite its 2024 founding, Scooter reportedly works with more than 50 companies and has added 14 customers in recent months. Its verified candidate pool stands at over 10,000 sales professionals. The startup's primary market is other startups and growth-stage companies looking to build out sales functions quickly and with greater confidence.

### Use of Funds The pre-seed proceeds will be directed toward product development and further simplifying the end-to-end sales hiring process for both candidates and hiring managers, according to the company.

### Why It Matters for HR Tech Scooter is one of a growing cohort of assessment-first talent platforms challenging the dominance of applicant tracking systems built around CV parsing. Its niche focus on sales — a function where bad hires are particularly costly — and its use of video-based scenario assessments position it within the broader conversation around skills-based hiring and structured evaluation. For the Indian startup ecosystem, the raise also signals continued investor appetite for vertical HR-tech plays even at the earliest funding stages.