NEHA SINGH

CO-FOUNDER OF TRACXN TECHNOLOGIES

Neha Singh, along with her husband, Abhishek Goyal, founded

Tracxn Technologies as a platform that provides information for start-ups in
venture capital, private equity, and corporate development. The company
serves enterprise infrastructure and applications, technology, consumer, retail,
gaming, fintech, health-tech, life sciences, ed-tech, mobile, ad-tech, energy,
auto, telecom, media and entertainment, food, agriculture, investment
industries in India, Europe, South East Asia, and China. It focuses on helping
investors and corporates track innovation more efficiently and effectively on a
global scale. It has secured an undisclosed amount in funding from a slew of
top techpreneurs that include Nandan Nilekani, Sachin and Binny Bansal, Ratan
Tata, Mohandas Pai, WhatsApp’s Neeraj Arora and Junglee co-founder Anand
Rajaraman among others. Tracxn Technologies Private Limited was
incorporated in 2013 and is based in Bengaluru, India.

BACKGROUND
Neha comes from a modest background. Her father was a nuclear scientist at
the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai. From the very beginning, she
was a studious kid, and soon followed in her father and brother’s footsteps,
both IIT alumni, by enrolling for computer science at IIT-Bombay in 2003.
That’s where Singh, who was attracted to the ever-evolving world of tech,
narrowed down her specific area of interest.
Even as an undergraduate student, Singh kept up her academic record by
topping her class. She went on to pursue her Masters’ degree from the same
institute, and was a regular face at college tech competitions. That resulted in
an offer from a company that millions would kill for — the search engine
major, Google. Although the tech space interested her, she wanted to focus on
the future. “I was fascinated by technology and its impact on all the other
sectors. At the same time, I was curious to know more about the business side
of things,” she said. So, she opted for a job at the global consulting firm,
Boston Consulting Group in 2008, instead. As an associate who worked on the
retail, energy, telecom and consumer goods sectors, she began understanding
the nitty-gritty of running a business.
A little over a year later, Singh then decided to broaden her horizons and
applied for the job of an investment analyst at VC firm, Sequoia Capital in
2010. It was the learning there that built the foundation for the entrepreneur-
in-the-making. Back then, the VC universe was in its infancy, and not many
names were heard of. But it was here that her interest turned into a potential
market opportunity. As an investment analyst, she got a chance to learn
further about the strategies employed by successful businesses right from the
top level. She oversaw the series-A funding rounds of various emerging Indian
start-ups such as FreeCharge and Practo.

While at Sequoia, she had identified a market opportunity that was derived
from her own need as an analyst. While scouting for worthy business ideas to
fund, like any other investor, she also relied on her network and spent a large
amount of time sifting through data that wasn’t always easily available from
one source. That’s when the programmer in her decided to try an alternate
route and she decided to deploy her coding skills to develop a software
program that would help her shortlist companies based on certain metrics.
Singh discovered she wasn’t the only one combining code with analysis. The VC
community was a small circle and there were not a lot of VCs who could code.
So, that’s how she found out that there was another analyst at Accel Partners
who had developed a similar program. This is how she found her co-founder
and future husband, Abhishek Goyal. In his earlier stint, Abhishek founded
cosmetic centric start-up Urbantouch, which was sold to Gurgaon-based portal
Fashionandyou. Before Urbantouch, he worked with Yahoo, Amazon and VC
firm Accel Partners.

In addition to sharing common skill sets, the two began ideating on a business
proposition in 2012. Having worked as investment analysts, the dearth of
information on potential investees led them to think about a Gartner-like
analytics firm for the Indian market. While working at Sequoia, they discovered
that private market data is very inefficient. Sometimes for fairly basic details,
they would end up spending two to three days. Investors were losing valuable
time just discovering start-ups. Singh knew that with a service like this, there
was scope to create a major impact on the sector, and this was the intent
behind founding Tracxn Technologies. Tracxn’s goal was to make ‘discovery’ of
companies very efficient for private market investors. The aim was to help
investors stay on top of all start-ups coming up in sectors of their interest by
spending just a few minutes every week. So, in 2013, she quit Sequoia and
began work on her start-up.

SETTING UP THE START-UP

In May 2013, Goyal and Singh joined hands, pooled in their savings and
operated out of a tiny space at their incubator’s (Lightspeed Venture Partners')
office on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. Tracxn Technologies officially
came into being.
She had the full support of her parents when she started out, although they
did not imagine that Tracxn would grow to become something so big. She
attributes her big leap of faith to the role model she watched right from the
time she was a little kid – her mother. She was inspired by how even though
her mother had been married at a very young age and gone on to have three
kids, she was still determined to pursue her studies.
Post setting up their office in California, Neha and Abhishek hired two
engineers and began creating a data platform where start-ups would take
pride in getting listed. Tracxn focused on two areas to create this database —
upcoming sectors and investable start-ups. Feeds are curated lists of start-ups
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, they have set up dedicated analyst teams
covering each of these sectors. For the offline sectors, it covers education,
financial services, healthcare and consumers to name a few.
The platform would look out for emerging sectors, corporate acquisitions and
VC funding. They also started tracking a whole lot of things like job boards,
domain registrations, playstores, freelancing websites, activity of ex-founders,
etc. So, the minute a founder registered a website, posted a job looking for an
engineer or designed his website, Tracxn would get an alert. In addition to this,
start-ups would be tracked on the basis of innovation, scalability and their
impact potential.

Tracxn’s data analysis technology first identifies promising companies and

founders, and then its analysts take a closer look at fundamentals and trends.
It provides a platform where investors can pick a sector, such as consumer
robotics, and use the platform not only to understand the market, but also to
find a handful of promising companies to contact. This process usually takes
several weeks, but Singh says it can be shaved down to just a few hours with
Tracxn’s information and tools.
While there are other data analytics tools that focus on start-ups, including
Mattermark, Datafox, and CB Insights, Tracxn differentiates by focusing on
helping clients understand the market first before they look at individual
companies.
Within a year’s time, given their strong network and proven track record at
their respective VC firms, they were able to secure angel funding from the likes
of Sachin and Binny Bansal of Flipkart, Sahil Barua of Delhivery, Mohandas Pai,
Nandan Nilekani, Ratan Tata and many more. When the time came to scale up,
Singh realised it was better to move to India. So, they made Bengaluru, the IT
hub of India, their headquarters, with another office in the Bay Area.
PRESENT STATUS
Today, they count marquee names, corporates and PE firms like Andreessen
Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Google Capital, Dropbox, VMWare, Walmart,
Samsung, Target Corporation, Bosch, Deloitte, Mercedes-Benz, IIM
Ahmedabad, Stanford University and Flipkart etc. among their clients. In 2015,
the start-up turned incubator with the launch of Tracxn Labs that reportedly
secured $10 million in funding.
It was seed-funded by investors Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal of Flipkart and
Sahil Barua of Delhivery. Subsequently, it raised $3.5 million (series A) funding
from SAIF Partners. As of now, the company which is based out of Bengaluru
and California, has more than 360 employees, of which more than 150 are
analysts from IITs and BITS.
Tracxn’s start-up database is the largest start-up database covering 10 million
companies (100K plus in India). To put the size into context, it is 50 times larger
than other start-up databases globally. They also have rich profiles and traction
metrics collated from across dozens of sources. They have over 100 million
data points so far.
With a focus on markets in over 30 countries including India, China, North
America and Southeast Asia, it is set to grow to other frontiers too. But, the
woman at the helm of a firm, that grew from two engineers to 360 employees
this year, hasn’t changed a thing about her work schedule. She continues to
work 12-hour shifts, including the weekends.

Her main aim now is to help investors and corporates track innovation more
efficiently on a global scale. Tracxn aspires to cut down the effort required to
get discovered while the start-ups are in process of raising money. Their
primary target is private market investors -- VCs or Angels and M&A
departments in enterprises. On the customer front, their focus is on increasing
the share of investments they discover through Tracxn.
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 Singh thinks this can be put to good use in
multiple interesting ways.
To achieve this, Tracxn plans to expand coverage to Latin America, Israel, West
Asia, Europe and East Asia. In addition to adding more sectors, it plans to also
increase its product offerings for each customer segment. An ardent follower
of tech maven Elon Musk and extremely influenced by his work, Neha’s mantra
for success continues to be “Aim high”.

Submitted by: POOJA NAYYAR

Roll No. 016
SEC – A
EAC group 2
B.COM (H), Semester 2