Neha Singh, Co-founder – Tracxn
Neha Singh is a Technology Post Graduate from IIT Bombay, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She is interested in long-distance running, and has run two half marathons recently. Earlier in her career, she was a passionate IT person loved participating in coding contests where she ranked 38th in an All India Code Jam by Google.
She is Co-founder of Tracxn, a technology initiative that began operations in 2013. Tracxn helps Venture Capital funds scout Interesting Startups. Tracxn has sector focused Analyst teams covering various high investable areas across Enterprise, Consumer, Internet, Mobile, HealthTech, EdTech and more. The company tracks millions of private companies to help VCs, Corp Dev and IBs find and connect with upcoming startups!
With more operations in Bengaluru and California, Neha proudly boosts of building a team of more than 400 employees today, of which more than 130 are analysts.
She also has several Awards to her accolades that include “Google Women in Engineering” and Best student researcher, Microsoft Research, ACM Grand Finals 2008 (San Francisco) & 2009 (San Diego)
Here are some intercepts from an interview with her.
Was there an inflection point which turned you towards the path of entrepreneurship?
As an ex-VC from Sequoia Capital, and I realised that VCs spent a disproportionate amount of time discovering investable startups. We always wished if we could spend less time on discovering companies and more time on building a thesis on market opportunities. On the other hand, founders spend equal time in identifying investors looking to invest in their sector. We saw an opportunity to leverage technology to address this information gap, and launched Tracxn.
How as Tracxn formed?
The organization began its operations at Lightspeed Venture Partners’ office in Menlo Park, California.
It was seed-funded by investors Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal of Flipkart and Sahil Barua of Delhivery.
Subsequently, we have raised $3.5 million (series A) funding from SAIF Partners and many prominent angel investments including Ratan Tata, Nandan Nilekani, Mohandas Pai, WhatsApp’s Neeraj Arora, Junglee Co-Founder Anand Rajaraman, Beenos founder Teruhide Sato, Freshdesk CEO Girish Mathrubootham, and Capillary Technologies CEO Aneesh Reddy.
We are quite excited to be seeing traction with our investors in what we are doing and its good to believe that our ideas are disruptive.
Which has been your most challenging assignment so far?
Identifying and recruiting the best talent, and building a world-class team from the bottom-up, and defining the most appropriate organisation structure. We make sure that all our new employees understand our company culture through an onboarding process which keeps us all on the same page.
What are your experiences on being a woman entrepreneur?
Luckily, I have found no biases from investors or from enterprise customers. Making the first few key team hires when you are an early stage tech startup is a challenge for any entrepreneur, it certainly wasn’t easy for me.