Research firm Tracxn raises $3.5 million from SAIF Partners

SAIF Partners, the venture capital firm with over $4B under management has announced an investment of $3.5 million in Tracxn, a research platform for private market investors.

Tracxn aims to use the funds towards building the largest team of analysts tracking start-ups globally. At present, the platform has a team of 30 analysts which it targets to expand to 150 people by the end of the year.

Tracxn captures all digital footprints about start-ups and combines it with human curation to provide an information platform for private market investors and decision makers. They consider it to be Gartner for startups information. Just like Gartner provides rich research for the IT sector, Tracxn is building a similar platform for the startup eco-system.

Tracxn was started by ex-investors from Sequoia and Accel in 2013. The initial angel investors included founders of Flipkart amongst others. More than half of the current team comprises analysts covering various verticals. They currently derive insights through large scale data aggregation in seven practice areas of Enterprise Infrastructure, Enterprise Applications, Technology, Mobile, Consumer, FinTech, and Emerging Markets. Venture Funds and Corporate Development teams subscribe to Tracxn coverage based on the areas they invest in. They couple it with their internal sourcing and sector research efforts. Tracxn, at present, works with over 50 venture funds which include some of the marquee names in the industry.

“Our primary customers are VC, PE and Corp Dev. For instance if you want to look at sectors like “Smart Home”, “Sharing Economies” or “Industrial Robotics” for investment, M&A or strategic partnership purposes, we are probably the most comprehensive resource available today,” says, Neha Singh, co-founder Tracxn.

Speaking on the investment, SAIF Partners spokesperson Mukul Singhal, said, “We are pleased to associate with a one-of-its-kind platform such as Tracxn. It addresses a crucial pain point of information and connection in the start-up eco-system and therefore holds tremendous potential. Additionally, the stellar team behind Tracxn ensures immense promise for its rapid expansion and scalability.”      

Singh said, “Today, understanding any space in the private market and connecting start-ups and investors is very inefficient. Today if an investor has a thesis around “Robotics” and wants to understand what plays exist in the market, which companies are innovating the each segment, none of the existing databases can solve this. The way we have solved it is that we have set up a dedicated Analyst for tracking this sector. He tracks all companies coming up in that sector, identifies the segments companies are innovating in and analyses the trends in what entrepreneurs are doing within Robotics. So now, essentially and investor can get upto-speed on a sector like “Robotics” within just a couple of hours. We want to bridge this information and connect gap."