Ex-VCs want to put venture industry on steroids through their startup Tracxn

Few years ago while Abhishek Goyal was part of venture capital firm Accel Partners, he believed in the potential of adtech industry and wanted to meet every startup in that space. For discovering startups he mostly relied on the internet and his personal network in adtech domain. “It was insanely time consuming, and yet there was a constant anxiety about missing out an exciting startup,” says Abhishek.

As an investor, Abhishek always wished he could spend less time on discovering companies and more time on analysing markets and opportunities. With motivation to solve this gap for investors, Abhishek and Neha Singh saw an opportunity to leverage technology to address this information gap, and launched Tracxn.

Tracxn’s goal is to make ‘discovery’ of companies very efficient for private market investors. At present, the startup offers two key products -- feeds and startup database.

Feeds are curated lists of startups in highly investible sectors. In India, Tracxn tracks sectors like SaaS, internet, mobile, marketplaces, healthtech, adtech, edtech, and fintech. Globally, it tracks 50 plus sectors. “Internally, we have set up dedicated analyst teams covering each of these sectors. The aim is to help investors stay on top of all startups coming up in sectors of their interest by spending just a few minutes every week,” adds Neha, Tracxn Co-founder.

In his earlier stint, Abhishek founded cosmetic centric startup Urbantouch, which was sold to Gurgaon-based portal Fashionandyou. Before Urbantouch, he worked with Yahoo, Amazon and VC firm Accel Partners.

Neha, an IIT-B and Stanford GSB alumnus, worked with Sequoia Capital. During their stint at VC firms, the duo has done angel rounds in companies like Delhivery, TravelTriangle, TouchTalent and VacationLabs.

Tracxn’s startup database is the largest startup database covering 10 million companies (100K plus in India). To put the size into context, it is 50 times larger than other startup databases globally. “We also have rich profiles and traction metrics collated from across dozens of sources. We have over 100 million data points so far,” points out Abhishek.

For the offline sectors, it covers education, financial services, healthcare and consumer to name a few. Tracxn also aspires to cut down the effort required to get discovered while the startups are in process of raising money.

“Our primary target is private market investors -- VCs or Angels and M&A departments in enterprises. We have pretty much sold to every customer we have spoken to so far. Interestingly, a large fraction of them didn't even need an assisted or live demo before signing up. So it's been very encouraging,” reveals Neha.

Size of the opportunity

“We think we can cater to all kinds of private market investors, M&A functions in enterprises, and business development teams. We are in a green field market, so we are constantly discovering new market opportunities we can address,” says Neha. In the long run, Tracxn will have very high quality data about markets, and an army of analysts which would have seen every company in their market in depth and have insights about them. “This is a skill set/intelligence which no other company has globally and we think this can be put to good use in multiple interesting ways,” she adds.

Road ahead

With a 20-member team, the startup plans to grow aggressively to a 200-member analyst team and invest heavily in technology. “On the customer front, our focus is on increasing the share of investments they discover through us,” says Abhishek.