During his days as an associate at venture capital firm Accel, Abhishek Goyal encountered a problem that eventually became the starting point for Tracxn. Having helped lead the firm’s first investment round in Flipkart in 2008, much of his work involved sourcing startups, researching markets and evaluating companies. The process meant spending hours pulling together information that was difficult to find in one place.
The gap was obvious when compared with public markets, where investors had access to platforms such as Bloomberg, Reuters and FactSet. Private-market investors had little equivalent infrastructure. “Public market investors had platforms like Bloomberg, Reuters, and FactSet, but private markets had nothing. The work was manual and inefficient,” Goyal said. “Having lived that frustration every day, we saw the chance to build the infrastructure layer for private market intelligence.”
The idea kept resurfacing in conversations with Neha Singh, then an investment analyst at Sequoia Capital. Like Goyal, Singh had studied computer science and had moved into venture investing after college. Their experience gave them a view of the problem from inside the investment process, rather than as an abstract technology opportunity.
In 2013, the two left their jobs and founded Tracxn, with the initial idea of building a data intelligence platform for private markets. The company today provides data and research on private companies to investors, corporations and other institutions, covering everything from company profiles and funding to financial and industry data.
The decision to become entrepreneurs was not entirely unfamiliar territory for Goyal. “I grew up in a Marwari business family, so business and entrepreneurship were part of our everyday conversations at home,” he said. But his own path had initially been more academic and technological. He secured a top-100 JEE rank in 1998, studied computer science at IIT Kanpur and subsequently worked at Yahoo! and Amazon. Those experiences, he said, shaped his thinking about innovation, long-term execution and building products at scale.
For Tracxn, however, the first product was built by staying close to prospective customers. Goyal and Singh showed early versions of the platform to potential users, gathered feedback and refined the offering. The launch itself was modest, but customer response came quickly. “We started reaching out to VCs to sell our offering and had a 100% win rate in the early days,” Goyal said.
Their existing network also helped them raise the first money. The initial angel round came from founders and entrepreneurs with whom the two had previously worked, including Flipkart co-founders Sachin and Binny Bansal, Ratan Tata, Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham and Delhivery co-founder Sahil Barua.
That capital went into building the product, which in turn generated the first revenues. As the business scaled, venture capital investors began approaching Tracxn, eventually leading to its Series A round. The company’s basic proposition, meanwhile, remained intact even as the product became increasingly technology-led and its datasets expanded.
The business is now at a very different scale, although growth has not been linear. In the first quarter of FY27, Tracxn’s revenue from operations declined 0.6% year-on-year to Rs 21.08 crore, while it reported a net loss of Rs 3.01 crore compared with a net profit of Rs 1.12 crore a year earlier. About 70% of its revenue now comes from outside India, with customers across more than 50 countries. The platform now tracks 64 million legal entities, 1.6 million companies with revenue data and 1.1 million companies with detailed financial statements.
The next phase is increasingly being shaped by artificial intelligence (AI). Tracxn has introduced a built-in chat interface through its AI Suite and is integrating its data into external AI tools through Model Context Protocol connectors for platforms including Claude and ChatGPT.
“AI can really simplify how customers interact with the platform,” Goyal said. Instead of navigating multiple filters and databases, users can ask questions in natural language and receive relevant insights faster. The company also sees AI as a way to put its proprietary data directly into customers’ existing workflows.
The technology is being applied internally as well. Goyal said Tracxn has increased its data coverage while reducing the team size and cost involved in producing that data. “Over time, technology will be a lever for three realms: improve user experience, create new revenue channels and drive greater operating efficiency.”
Tracxn is also looking to expand its investment banking, corporate M&A and innovation and corporate sales businesses, while pushing products such as Stealth and Talent Signals in the US and Europe.