On a bike, what makes you go fast isn't how you pedal. It's the chain that turns that effort into motion. When one link is weak, the chain slips off the gear, and you keep pedalling hard and go nowhere.

Sales hiring is that chain. Sourcing, screening, assessing, interviewing: if any link is weak, all a founder's effort stops turning into pipeline. We started Scooter because we'd each seen that chain break, from two different sides.

Kartik saw it from the sales floor. He led sales teams at Gartner, Shoptimize and Graas for 14 years. "My first hire at Gartner came in on a strong reference and interviewed well. He then spent six months without building any pipeline, and most of my time went into managing him out. Looking back, bad hires were the root cause of the years I missed target. The years I hired a great team were the years I did well."

Saumya saw the behavioral and decision making side of it. She was the first employee at a startup that scaled from a handful of people to over a hundred before it was acquired, and trained in behavioural science at Penn. "I watched hiring become the bottleneck and sales seats were always the hardest to fill well. Truth is there's no perfect hire, only a good match, and gut feel will always play a part. It just shouldn't be the only or the first part. Facts first, instinct on top."

Together, we built Scooter for seed to Series A founders in India. We keep a pool of verified sellers, assess them on real sales scenarios instead of their CVs, and give founders a stack-ranked shortlist rather than a pile of profiles.

Backed by AJVC

In April, we closed our round led by AJVC. Aviral runs one of the most transparent, founder-friendly processes out there; even pitching him teaches you something. Since then, he's been in the trenches with us every week. For first-time founders, that's worth more than the cheque.

We held off on announcing because we wanted the numbers to do the talking. Scooter now works with over 50 companies, from fast-growing startups to well-established names, and 14 of them joined in the last few months alone. Since April, we've placed 18 sales hires. Most founders budget two months for a sales hire. One of ours made it in six days.

What's next

Since April, we've rebuilt every link in the chain: how we source, screen, assess and shortlist sellers. Hiring managers now meet candidates through short assessment clips before they ever see a CV.

But we're just getting started. We want to build the most intuitive, genuinely delightful hiring product in the world. One where a hiring manager doesn't get a pile of resumes, but three or four people who fit so well there's nothing left to scroll. Where every sales hire starts with evidence, not a guess. We're building it deliberately with craft and care, because the people on both sides of a hire deserve that.

That's what this round is for.

Thank you

To our early customers: thank you for taking a chance on relative nobodies, for being honest about what we lacked, and for being patient while we built it.

To our team: young, hungry and ridiculously talented. You build faster than we can dream it up. None of this happens without you.

If you're a founder or sales leader about to make a sales hire, write to us at kartik@thescooter.ai / saumya@thescooter.ai and tell us what role you're hiring for. We'd love to talk.

— Saumya & Kartik