Startups are, by nature, privately-held entities that have no legal obligation to share their data publicly, which is why it can be difficult to keep track of them. Potential investors wanting to seek out promising startups generally have to pull information regarding a startup that they’re interested in from numerous sources, which is a tedious process. Fortunately, there’s a startup known as Tracxn! that wants to make this process easier. Essentially, it’s a startup that keeps track of other startups.
At their previous jobs at venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, respectively, Neha Singh and Abhishek Goyal often had to help identify prospective startups and make investment decisions. But it wasn’t always easy. Startups usually don’t disclose information about themselves, since they are privately held firms and are under no compulsion to share data publicly. So, Singh and Goyal had to constantly struggle to collate information from multiple sources. Eventually, fed up with the lack of a single source for data, the Indian Institute of Technology graduates quit their jobs in 2013 to start an analytics firm, Tracxn!. Their ambition: To become the Gartner—the go-to firm for information technology research—of the startup ecosystem. “It’s almost surprising,” Singh told Quartz in an email interview, “that despite billions of dollars invested in each of the sectors (be in foodtech or mobile commerce, or payments, etc), thousands of people employed in this ecosystem and many more aspiring to start something here, there is not a single source which tracks and provides insights these private markets.”