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Being funded by some big players, Tracxn has led on to solve investor’s dilemma

Updated: Feb 05, 2016 06:26:07am
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New Delhi, Feb 5 (KNN) Tracxn, an analytics firm based in Bangalore, aims to counter the inefficiencies in the startup ecosystem that makes it difficult for startups and investors to connect with each other. Tracxn is making an effort to make it easier and faster for potential investors to understand the sector of their interest.

The venture has formulated technology to capture the digital footprints about startups and combining it with human curation, providing an information platform for private market investors and decision makers. The company is targeted towards the VC industry, PE funds and Corp developments and monetizes via a subscription fee.

Tracxn, stating themselves  as “Gartner for start-ups information” was launched in 2013 by Neha Singh, who was previously an investment analyst for Sequoia Capital , and Abhishek Goyal, a former associate at Accel Partners.  

KNN caught up with Neha Singh, the co-founder of Tracxn for a conversation:

1. What was the notion behind bringing up 'Tracxn'?

As investors, we spent disproportionate time discovering startups. We always wished if we could spend less time on discovering companies and more time on building thesis on market opportunities. On the other hand founders spend equal time in identifying investors looking to invest in their sector. This is big value loss in the entrepreneurial eco-system. We saw an opportunity to leverage technology to address this information gap, and launched Tracxn. Today, we are the largest startup research platform having more than 120+ Analyst.

2. What is so unique about your business that provides you competitive advantage? 

This is where we stand out— our ‘business model’ tagging feature and the wide range of metrics in the platform enables and empowers the analyst team to extract meaningful insights from the data. For instance, we are able to see - what business models saw the most companies founded in India in 2015 by entrepreneurs. The seed funding typically follows this trend by a lag of few weeks. Or what sectors got the investors most excited globally. We are also able to see which sectors saw most growth in terms of team sizes, and much more.

3. What is the potential market size for your product today? And what it is growth rate?

It is very difficult to put a number to it, but the market is pretty huge. Everyone is looking up to India as a top investment destination. We have investors across different categories vying for investable companies.

4. How do you advertise your business?

Considering, we cater to a very niche audience, we don’t see a rationale in advertising at this point in time.

5. What risks have you faced till now and what issues still exist?

I would rather say, finding the right product-market fit was the biggest challenge in the initial year, and then comes the ‘scaling up’ phase which again comes up with its own set of challenges.

6. What is the current size of your start-up, in terms of employees, as well as, annual turnover?

We haven't disclosed our revenue numbers publicly. To give a sense of our growth, in 2015 we grew our subscription ARR (annualized recurring revenue) by almost 10x as compared to 2014. Our headcount stands at 300 as of now).

7. Entrepreneurs have certain cashflow projections and forecast analysis before starting a business. How much investment did you require at the initial stage of building up your business and how did you manage to acquire the required funds?

Tracxn was seed funded by marquee investors which includes Sachin Bansal, Binny Bansal of Flipkart and Sahil Barua of Delhivery. Subsequently, we raised $3.5M (series A) funding from SAIF partners, and more recently we have received angel funding by Mr. Ratan Tata.

8. Do you think the current policy structure is favourable for start-up ventures in India?

I feel the situation is finally improving for entrepreneurs across the board. This is the first government to acknowledge the startup space in India in such an emphatic manner. The self-certification is a great example of ‘minimal intrusion’ and the ‘tax exemptions’ along with the startups ‘fund of funds’ are all adding up to the overall cause of ease of doing business. We are optimistic about the role of government in promoting the Indian startup eco-system.

9. If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?

Take Advice from People who have done something similar before; take feedback, a lot of it. (KNN Bureau)

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