A Start-up Data Miner Filling the huge information gap of start-ups with data everybody wants to know about.

In a tête-à-tête with BIZ Experiences India, Abhishek Goyal, co-founder Tracxn, explains how he got into tracking data related to startups.

While I and my co-founder Neha Singh were working at VC firms previously, we realized of a huge information gap when it came to start-ups. So we thought of setting up a central research team to track data related to startups as today everybody wants to know about them. So in May 2013, we started Tracxn but it took us one and a half years to get the right product/market fit. Our customers include companies in private market investment industry and large corporates or public companies such as LG, Samsung and GE.

We have multiple servers crunching data around startups and tracking interesting aspects from the web to find interesting companies. So technology is a centerpiece of it. It would cost us 10 times more to do it in absence of technology.

Leading the Game

We entered 2015 with just 25 people but ended with 260 people. Our revenue also grew by almost five times in the same year with around 150 customers and 6,000 paid users (multiple users in one company). Globally, there are less than 10 companies tracking start-ups. We are ahead of all of them in terms of depth of research. Moreover, we are pretty much the largest team in this space. We do due diligence for start-ups which is not offered by anyone else. We are growing 15 percent monthly, adding roughly 30 customers a month. We are synonymous to what Bloomberg or Gartner do for public market research. However, overtime private market research will become phenomenally large worth around $2-3 billion. Last month, we raised a strategic angel round of less than $1 million from Tata Son's Chairman Emeritus Ratan Tata.

We would be looking to grow our customer base by 10 times this year and attain a hockey stick growth for both 2016 and 2017. We now know what our customer needs and our distribution strategy is streamlined. That's why, from current 30-member sales team, we are taking it to 200 people by 2016 end and overall employee strength to 600. We track almost 200+ sectors, which is a very high number, and would going to probably 300 by 2016 end. Also our geography coverage is a lot wider than other companies' as we cover almost 20 countries. From next two year onwards, we are looking at five-10 times growth in our annual revenues. We would be probably looking to raise around $20 million this year.

This is an excerpt from the interview published this month in BIZ Experiences magazine. Read the magazine for full interview.