Tracxn, A Bloomberg + Gartner For Startups: In Conversation With Abhishek Goyal, Founder, Tracxn

Two entrepreneurs, Abhishek Goyal and Neha Singh, both who have worked with leading investment firms, paired together, to launch a comprehensive database of startups.

Tracxn, is a product aiming at  solving the need of Venture Capitalists and private companies who are always on a look out for good startups.

While Neha has spent a good time with consulting and investment field, Abhishek in his earlier role has worked with array of leading companies from Amazon to Yahoo. Lastly, he was heading UrbanTouch.com, an Indian ecommerce firm, as CEO.

We spoke with Abhishek on his shift as an entrepreneur from Ecommerce to BigData, on how Tracxn works and the thought process behind it.

Inc42: You have crafted a venture into ecommerce and then have exited it (UrbanTouch), so how come from ecommerce to BigData? I mean how did the idea to launch Tracxn came up?

Abhishek: If a fund or angel groups wants to find for interesting startups or scan a sector of interest, they will rely primarily on personal network, media coverage, events or google search to discover all the companies. More aggressive bunch even track job boards. Larger funds have build sizable teams of Analysts to achieve coverage.

All of these are very resource intensive and time consuming effort. And each fund or angel group re-invent the wheel on their own.

We thought there is significant value in doing it centrally for everyone and make it available.

Other interesting thing we observed that the digital footprint of companies was exploding. Me and my co-founder, Neha, who was with Sequoia Capital earlier, were both from Tech backgrounds. We saw an opportunity to leverage technology to address this very efficiently.

When we collect this information centrally and leverage technology, we can make it available for a fraction of the cost of what large funds spend today to achieve the same. This was part of genesis of thought behind Tracxn.

I am a someone who enjoys disrupting markets by finding unparallel underlying efficiencies in the market. And this was a market I relate to, so we ended up pursuing it.

Inc42: Is it a big data company?

Abhishek: We are addressing the global market. Big Data is obviously an interesting opportunity in global context. We are Headquarted in Palo Alto. Delivery is done from India office. But, I won’t completely label ourselves as Big Data company.

Inc42: What key services does Tracxn offers to users?

Abhishek: Think of Tracxn as “Bloomberg + Gartner for Startups”. We build technology to track all information around private companies and have expert analysts to organize the information and draw insights from it. We provide a super efficient way to have unbelievably high coverage. Our key offerings incluse – Feeds and startup database.

Inc42 Magazine: How does Feeds work?

Abhishek: “Feeds” are curated lists of startups in highly investible sectors. In India, we track sectors like SaaS, Internet, Mobile, Marketplaces, HealthTech, AdTech, EdTech, and FinTech. Globally, we track 50+ 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. We add new and interesting startups in each of these Feeds every day.

For instance, If I want to look at AdTech startups in India, I could scan all 100+ companies together. Today, 17 of them are funded (one in every six, which is a pretty high ratio as compared to most sectors), and shortlist 4 unfunded startups that I wanted to reach out to for angel investment – all of this in less than 4 hours!

Inc42: Tell us about the startup database Tracxn has build?

Abhishek: Tracxn Startup Database is the largest startup database covering 10 million companies (100K+ in India). To put the size into context, it is 50 times larger than other startup databases! In addition to getting the list of companies, we also have rich Profiles and Traction Metrics collated from across dozens of sources.

One can browse startups by

• Investor, Incubator – Useful to quickly scan entire portfolios and bookmark interesting companies.
• City – Helpful when you are visiting a city and want to meet 2-3 additional interesting companies
• High Growth companies – Using a combination of Founded Year, Funding raised and Team Size
• List of Acquisitions or Public companies by their IPO year.
• More importantly you can now do a Google-like keyword search over millions of company profiles. E.g. you can look for companies globally which are “Marketplaces” + “founded in the last 3 years” + “Raised more than $20m” very easily. This is very handy to find global competitors of a company

Inc42: When did the platform went live? How has been the response?

Abhishek: We have been working with multiple beta customers for last 4 months. We opened it for larger audience this wednesday. We have closed everyone we could speak to :-).

We typically do a call and explain the offering before we sign the customers. Since the value proposition is very strong, the decision making is faster.

Inc42: Who will be your direct or indirect competitors?

Abhishek: Direct – There isn’t anywho who is doing a combination of Manual intelligence and data. So the quality of data & insights that we can deliver is very unique for VCs and Corpdev

Indirect – There are players who solving the same problem differently or competing for the same wallet share. Datafox, Mattermark, Inkwire are some of them.

Inc42: Please explain us about the pricing and the monetisation model?

Abhishek: Venture funds in US, pay us anywhere between $1000 to $10,000 per month, depending upon how many feeds they subscribe to. Indian funds typically pay us between 75K to 3L per month.

Inc42: Is Tracxn self funded or has raised external funding?

Abhishek: We have raised money from angels.

Inc42: How big is your team?

Abhishek: We are a 20 member team right now. I and Neha  started this venture together.

Inc42 Magazine: 3 advices for budding entrepreneurs?

Abhishek: Markets are significantly more powerful than your capability and rigour

If you don’t optimize it then someone else will

Never underestimate the pace of wave (or change)