Neha Singh left Sequoia and Stanford to build Tracxn, and rang the bell at NSE in 2022

On 20 October 2022, Tracxn Technologies Limited listed on the National Stock Exchange and the Bombay Stock Exchange. The listing was not a giant headline number, the IPO was a modest offer-for-sale at a price band of ₹75–80 per share, with the stock debuting on NSE at ₹84.50, but it was unusual in two structural ways. It was a B2B SaaS IPO on Indian bourses (rare), and it was led by a woman CEO (rarer still).

The company behind that listing was co-founded a decade earlier by Neha Singh and Abhishek Goyal. Tracxn Technologies Limited was incorporated on 11 August 2012, with the brand publicly launched in 2013. Neha is Co-founder and CEO. Abhishek is Co-founder and Executive Chairman. Both came at the private-markets data problem from inside the venture-capital industry, where they had been first-hand customers of the gap Tracxn would later try to fill.

The data-quality problem inside a venture firm

Neha Singh’s pre-Tracxn career reads like a deliberately built operator’s CV: B.Tech in Computer Science at IIT Bombay, then Boston Consulting Group as a consultant, then Sequoia Capital India as an investor. She then went on to do an MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she was a Reliance Dhirubhai Ambani Fellow.

The founding insight came from inside Sequoia. Sourcing and tracking private companies was, by her own retelling, a stitched-together exercise across spreadsheets, news alerts and human research. There was no Bloomberg for the private-market universe, no canonical, queryable dataset of who founded what, when, in which sector, with which competitors, with which funding history. Abhishek Goyal, who had been at Accel India, had seen the same problem from a different fund’s side of the table.

Building “Bloomberg for private markets”

Tracxn’s product is in some ways the opposite of a shiny consumer surface. It is a deeply structured database of private companies organised by sector taxonomies, with deal histories, funding rounds, competitive maps and analyst-curated coverage. The customers are investors, mergers-and-acquisitions teams, consulting firms and corporate strategy desks, people whose job is to understand the private-company universe before they place a bet, a bid or a budget on it.

That kind of company is unusually hard to build out of India. It needs heavy editorial process discipline, long-running data engineering, a sales motion that sells to sophisticated buyers, and patience, B2B SaaS revenue scales in subscriptions, not in viral moments. Tracxn raised money to fund that long curve, angel and seed funding through 2013, followed by venture rounds including Accel, Elevation Capital (formerly SAIF Partners), and Prime Venture Partners.

From private SaaS to a public-market filing

By 2022, Tracxn had built up enough operating depth that the founders chose the public markets over the next private round. The IPO subscription window ran from 10 to 12 October 2022 at a price band of ₹75–80 per share. On 20 October 2022 the stock listed on NSE and BSE, debuting at ₹84.50 on NSE, a roughly 5.6 percent premium to the issue price, before settling into the usual texture of a freshly-listed small-cap.

What changed after the listing is not the headline quarterly number, that depends on the exact reporting period, but the shape of the company. Tracxn now reports as a publicly listed entity, with quarterly disclosures, an audit committee and a board with independent directors. That is a different texture from a private SaaS company, and a different texture from the founder-led D2C profiles that dominate Indian coverage of women entrepreneurs.

A different shape of Indian woman founder

Most Indian woman-founded companies that make headlines today sit in consumer categories: beauty, food, fashion, wellness. Tracxn is structurally different. It is a B2B SaaS company, and its product is data. The narrative arc is less “born from a mother’s frustration with the supermarket aisle” and more “born from an investor’s frustration with her own desk.”

That is part of why Neha Singh’s career matters. In a market where women founders are clustered heavily in consumer categories, partly because those are the categories with lowest capital intensity to enter, a listed B2B SaaS company led by a woman CEO is a structural counter-example. The story is also a clean arc: IIT Bombay, BCG, Sequoia, Stanford, founder, CEO, listed-company chief executive. There is no off-ramp.

What Indian women founders can take from the Tracxn story

The Tracxn arc is a useful corrective to the dominant Indian woman-founder narrative. It says: you can build a listed company by going long on an unglamorous infrastructure problem; you can spend a decade methodically building the dataset rather than the brand; you can come out of a venture-capital firm and choose to be a B2B SaaS founder rather than to keep deploying capital into other people’s ideas.

For Indian women considering starting up, especially those coming out of consulting, banking or venture firms, Tracxn is the playbook for taking what your last desk taught you and building a product around the gap it kept leaving. You don’t need to leave your domain to start a company; sometimes the most defensible thing you can do is stay in it long enough to see the next layer.

Frequently asked questions about Neha Singh and Tracxn

Who founded Tracxn?

Tracxn was co-founded by Neha Singh and Abhishek Goyal. Tracxn Technologies Limited was incorporated on 11 August 2012; the brand was publicly launched in 2013. Neha Singh is Co-founder and CEO; Abhishek Goyal is Co-founder and Executive Chairman. Both founders had institutional backgrounds before the company, Neha at Sequoia Capital India and Boston Consulting Group, Abhishek at Accel India.

What does Tracxn do?

Tracxn is a B2B SaaS company that builds a private-market data platform, profiles of startups and private companies, sector taxonomies, deal histories and competitive maps for investors, M&A teams, consulting firms and corporate strategy teams. The platform is often described in shorthand as a Bloomberg-style data terminal for the private-company universe.

When did Tracxn go public?

Tracxn listed on the National Stock Exchange and the Bombay Stock Exchange on 20 October 2022. The IPO subscription window ran from 10 to 12 October 2022 at a price band of ₹75–80 per share. Tracxn is publicly cited as one of the few B2B SaaS IPOs on Indian bourses and one of the rare woman-CEO-led tech IPOs in the market.

What is Neha Singh’s background?

Neha Singh studied Computer Science at IIT Bombay before going to Boston Consulting Group as a consultant and later joining Sequoia Capital India as an investor. She then completed an MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she was a Reliance Dhirubhai Ambani Fellow. Tracxn grew out of the data-quality gap she had observed while sourcing private-company information at Sequoia.

What is Neha Singh’s net worth?

There is no fixed net-worth figure for Neha Singh. What is documented is her pre-IPO stake: she held roughly 12% of Tracxn ahead of its October 2022 listing on the NSE and BSE. The value of that holding moves with Tracxn’s (small-cap) share price, so a single “net worth” number would not be reliable.