The Story
Scooter has raised ₹1.5 crore in a pre-seed round led by Aviral Bhatnagar's ajvc. It is the fund's first investment in a Pune-based startup. The valuation was not disclosed.
Kartik Mandrekar and Saumya Seth founded the company in 2024. Mandrekar has led sales teams at Gartner, Shoptimize and Graas, and was later an entrepreneur in residence at Antler. Seth is a behavioural scientist with a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
Scooter helps startups hire salespeople by assessing them on real sales scenarios rather than relying mainly on their CVs. It sources verified sales professionals, puts them through recorded role-plays, and gives hiring managers a shortlist of three to five candidates. Managers can watch short video clips from the assessments before they look at a candidate's CV.
The company works with more than 50 companies, 14 of them added in recent months, and has built a pool of over 10,000 sales candidates. It says one customer made a sales hire through the platform in six days.
The money goes into the product and into making the hiring process simpler for both candidates and hiring managers, with the company focused on cutting the time startups and sales teams spend finding and evaluating sales candidates.
Why It Matters
Engineering hiring moved to skills tests years ago. A software developer applying to almost any serious company expects to write code before anyone takes their CV at face value. Sales, the function whose output is easiest to measure once someone is in the job, still mostly hires on a CV and a conversation.
That is odd, because the CV is less reliable in sales than almost anywhere else. A claim to have hit 140 percent of quota cannot be checked, and even if true, it says little without context: whether the territory was strong, whether the leads arrived inbound or had to be found, whether the product sold itself. Mandrekar's own writing on sales hiring is built around exactly this problem, interrogating the numbers on a CV because they so often fall apart under questioning.
The interview is worse, and for a reason specific to the job. A sales candidate in an interview is doing the work being assessed: persuading a buyer. But the buyer is friendly, already interested and actively hoping the candidate turns out well. It is the easiest sale the candidate will ever make. The skill that actually separates good salespeople, handling a sceptical buyer who raises objections, pushes on price and has no reason to say yes, rarely appears in the room. Interviews reward people who are good at selling themselves, which overlaps with being good at sales but is not the same thing.
The timing makes this sharper. CVs and cover letters are now routinely polished or written with AI, which has drained much of the remaining signal from written applications. A recorded role-play in which someone handles a live objection is far harder to fake, and it shows the thing the manager actually needs to see.
The cost of getting it wrong is high and arrives quickly. A bad sales hire spends months ramping, misses quota, burns through the pipeline it was given, and usually leaves within a year. For a startup hiring its first salespeople, where the founders have been doing the selling themselves and are not sure what good looks like, that mistake can set revenue back by a quarter or more.
The Strategic Read
The cheque is the familiar one. ₹1.5 crore is ajvc's standard pre-seed ticket, the same amount it put into Slayd, MoroMaa and Iztri, and Scooter is the sixth ajvc company to appear on these pages and the fund's first in Pune. The pattern of a fixed price and a fast decision continues to hold.
The more interesting detail is the order in which a hiring manager sees things. Scooter shows the assessment clips first and the CV afterwards, and that is a deliberate design choice rather than an interface preference. Once a manager has seen a candidate's previous employer and college, everything after is read through that frame. A polished answer from someone with a famous logo on their CV looks like confirmation; the same answer from an unknown looks like luck. Showing the performance first forces the judgement to be made on the evidence before the credentials can colour it. That is a behavioural science problem, and it is where Seth's background shows up in the product rather than in the founder biography.
The business model is the question the announcement leaves open. Scooter delivers a shortlist of three to five people, which is what a recruitment firm does, and recruitment firms in India typically charge a percentage of the hire's first-year pay. If that is how Scooter earns, it has agency economics with better tools, and growth will follow the size of the team placing candidates. If customers pay for the assessment platform itself, it looks more like software and can scale beyond headcount. The company has not said which, and the answer decides what kind of business ₹1.5 crore is funding.
The candidate side deserves the same scrutiny. A pool of 10,000 is a real asset at this stage, but the best salespeople are rarely looking for work; they get poached through referrals while still hitting quota somewhere else. An assessment asks for time and asks candidates to perform on camera, which is a fair trade for someone actively searching and a hard sell for someone who is not. The pitch to candidates has to be that one assessment replaces several rounds of interviews, and that is the half of the marketplace worth watching.
Then there is what counts as success. A hire in six days is a speed claim, and speed is the easier thing to prove. The claim that matters is quality: whether Scooter's hires ramp faster, hit quota and stay longer than the ones a company would have found on its own. That takes quarters to show, and it is the data that will eventually tell customers whether watching a role-play really predicts a closer.
For daily, sharp analysis of the biggest moves in the Indian business and startup ecosystem, follow StartupFox.
