meet the geeks
NEHA SINGH, CO-FOUNDER, TRACXN
Neha Singh is a pioneer in the private investing space in India and is a co-founder of one of the leading data intelligence platforms for private markets - Tracxn. She has over a decade of experience in the venture funding space which also includes notable investments such as Practo, Freecharge amongst others.
Born and brought up in Mumbai, Neha grew up in an academically-inclined family,with her father being a nuclear scientist at the prestigious Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. She was raised in the Centre's residential township itself, surrounded by a community of scientific superachievers, that encouraged taking up a career in academia. However, Neha was always inclined towards building something of her own, which started with her initially taking up jobs in consulting and venture capital investing, where she developed a deeper understanding of the startup ecosystem. She eventually took the plunge into founding her own startup, Tracxn, becoming the first entrepreneur in her family. This desire to launch her own startup was driven by her curiosity and eagerness to build a solution to the lack of private market data information available to the public.
Neha’s educational background formed the very foundation of her journey with building Tracxn. Being a gold medalist in Computer Science (B.Tech & M.Tech) from IIT Bombay, she developed and refined her coding skills, which gave her the aptitude to develop a SaaS product. Following her undergraduate studies, she joined Boston Consulting Group, followed by Sequoia Capital, to understand the venture funding space that was at a nascent stage in India. During this period she realised how difficult it was to get information on private companies. She wanted to synthesise a solution to the problem and decided to develop a software that accurately tracks and compiles data on private businesses. While Tracxn as a product was still in its nascent stage, she met Abhishek Goyal, a techie turned investor, who had identified the same problem statement as Neha and was looking to build a solution to it himself. After she joined forces with Abhishek to develop Tracxn, Neha pursued an MBA at the Stanford Graduate School for Business, where she was a Reliance Dhirubai Ambani Fellow. The rationale was to launch Tracxn from the Silicon Valley and start building their customer base from there. Tracxn was launched in 2013 and immediately captivated the attention of investors due to its robust database of information on the startup space.
Once Tracxn started scaling its operations, the company headquarters, as well as Neha, made the move to Bangalore, to continue building the company and turn it into a leading home-grown provider of market information.
Following the growth and success of Tracxn, Neha has received numerous prestigious awards for her leadership and business acumen. She was recognized as “Outstanding Women in Business” by Outlook Business in 2016. In the same year, she also featured in the “Livemint : the 40 who matters in the Indian Startup Ecosystem,” a list featuring the likes of Mukesh Ambani, Binny Bansal, Vani Kola amongst other key personalities of the Indian startup ecosystem. Neha has been featured twice in the prestigious Fortune 40 Under 40 list consecutively in 2018 and 2019. Later in 2019, she was also acclaimed as one of the most powerful women in business by Business
Today. Recently, Neha was also part of LiveMint’s list of 100 women entrepreneurs who are building and shaping India.