Tracxn raises money from Teruhide Sato and other influential investors for startup data and market insights

Tracxn, a firm that researches and aggregates data about startups and the markets that they exist in, raised funding from a bunch of interesting investors today.

The list of investors includes two Infosys biggies – ex-CEO Nandan Nilekani and ex-CFO and Aarin Capital co-founder Mohandas Pai, as well as Whatsapp vice president Neeraj Arora. Startup founders also invested in this round, including Anand Rajaraman, the co-founder of Amazon-owned shopping service Junglee, Beenos founder Teruhide Sato, Freshdesk founder and CEO Girish Mathrubootham, and Capillary Technologies co-founder Aneesh Reddy. The amount was undisclosed, but we doubt that any of these investors would have thrown in pennies.

Before this, Tracxn raised two rounds of series A funding in 2015 totaling US$13.5 million from SAIF Partners and the two co-founders of Flipkart, Sachin and Binny Bansal. It used the second round of US$10 million from the two Bansals to fund its incubator, Tracxn Labs.

It also raised an undisclosed amount of money from Ratan Tata earlier this month. The startup currently has offices in Mountain View and Bangalore, with the majority of its revenue coming from the United States.

It also announced plans to expand into Japan, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and other parts of Europe. Tracxn claims to have grown its customer base by over 400 percent in the last year alone.

See: How Tracxn helps VCs with startup discovery, gets discovered by SAIF Partners

A startup that collects data on other startups

Tracxn was founded in 2013 by Neha Singh and Abhishek Goyal, both former investors. “At Accel, I used to spend a disproportionate amount of time on discovering startups and would still miss out on a lot of interesting ones or meet them too late,” Abhishek explained to Tech in Asia in a former interview. “And this was being re-invented across funds.” This spurred the idea behind Tracxn – a central database of information about startups with relevant context and actionable insights.

Data from the startup is currently used by everyone from venture capital firms to corporate development teams across the world. Tracxn’s competitors all offer slightly different things. CB Insights, for example, focuses on high-growth private companies.

Tracxn gathers data on all sorts of startups, including those that are unfunded and the many small ones that exist in highly crowded sectors. It makes money on a subscription basis.