The Engineer Who Made Sales Teams Smarter
Before Mindtickle had a sales team, it had a problem: enterprise companies were spending millions on sales training and watching it evaporate by Monday morning. Deepak Diwakar's job was to build the technology that would fix that - a platform where reps could practice, learn, and get coached continuously, not just at annual kickoffs. The code he wrote at IIT Bombay, scaled at PubMatic, and finally unleashed at Mindtickle became the technical spine of what is now a $1.2 billion revenue enablement company.
Diwakar grew up with a dual identity that most engineers don't develop. At the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay - one of India's most competitive technical programs - he was quietly writing Performing Arts Festival scripts on the side, three out of four years. The instinct to communicate, to shape a narrative that an audience would follow, would later reappear in how he thinks about product. When Mindtickle launches a feature, he goes back to recorded customer calls first. Not to a design spec. Not to a competitor teardown. To the actual words of the people who use the thing.
"Every time we launch a feature, I've always gone back to our calls to figure out the best way to communicate value in the words of the actual users."
- Deepak Diwakar, Co-Founder & COO, MindtickleFrom Hadoop to Revenue AI
After graduating in 2008, Diwakar took a detour through Avignon, France as a research scholar before landing at PubMatic - a programmatic ad tech startup that would itself become significant in the industry. His work there was distinctly unglamorous: Hadoop clusters, machine learning pipelines, geo-targeting algorithms, data volumes measured in terabytes per day. He was a backend plumber at the moment when "big data" was still figuring out what it meant. That experience of building infrastructure that actually scales - not infrastructure that scales on whiteboards - is what he brought to Mindtickle when he co-founded it in 2011 with his PubMatic colleague Krishna Depura and Nishant Mungali.
The company started in Pune and went through three significant pivots before finding its product-market fit in sales readiness. The pivot story is worth noting: Mindtickle began as a gamified learning platform for enterprises, then sharpened into sales-specific readiness, then broadened again into the category it now anchors: revenue enablement. Each pivot required Diwakar to rebuild or extend the technology layer while the product and go-to-market strategy repositioned around it. That kind of engineering flexibility - where the tech follows the insight rather than constraining it - is rarer than it sounds.
Building a Category, Not Just a Product
When Mindtickle first started pitching to enterprises, "sales readiness" wasn't a recognized software category. Analysts didn't have a bucket for it. Buyers didn't have a budget line for it. Diwakar and his co-founders had to simultaneously build the technology, win the customers, and educate the market that this category was real and worth buying. By the time SoftBank Vision Fund 2 wrote a $100 million check in November 2020 - followed by another $100 million in August 2021 - Mindtickle had made the category undeniable. That second round valued the company at $1.2 billion, making it India's 20th unicorn.
Deepak Diwakar on Video
The COO Who Writes Code and Scripts
Diwakar's title is COO, but the scope is technology: setting the technical direction, ensuring security and reliability, managing the global engineering team. As of 2025, the platform he oversees runs an AI role-play simulator, conversation intelligence, digital sales rooms, a sales content management system, and ElevateOS - Mindtickle's newly launched agentic operating system for revenue enablement, where AI agents can act autonomously within a sales rep's workflow. The stack is massive: Kubernetes, Apache Kafka, MongoDB, AWS Lambda, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, LangGraph, Anthropic Claude. Diwakar is not a figurehead COO. He is the technical owner of infrastructure that serves Fortune 500 companies at scale.
Outside of Mindtickle, he is an angel investor with a portfolio of six companies, focused on Enterprise Applications and High Tech - the verticals he knows from the inside. And on weekends, or whenever geography allows, he is on a mountain. His Twitter bio has not mentioned his valuation or funding rounds since he joined the platform in 2009. It reads: "A mountain traveller, a biker, a writer." The same three things it has always been.
Philanthropically, Diwakar supports the education of underprivileged children through grassroots initiatives - a commitment that sits quietly alongside the headline numbers but reflects where his values actually land when no one is writing a press release about it.
What Mindtickle Built
The platform Diwakar architected now touches every phase of a sales rep's working life: onboarding, continuous training, AI-powered coaching, content management, deal support, and performance analytics. The most striking recent development is ElevateOS, launched in May 2025, which Mindtickle describes as the first agentic operating system for revenue enablement. It is the logical extension of everything the company has been building: instead of giving reps tools to use, the platform starts acting on their behalf - surfacing relevant content, flagging deal risks, recommending coaching actions, and integrating directly into Salesforce workflows. The architecture for something like that doesn't appear overnight. Diwakar has been laying the engineering foundations for it since the early Hadoop days.