Category Archives: Products

The Tracxn IPO is a playbook for a true global tech play from India!

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Tracxn went public today… congrats to the founders, employees & investors!

It’s a small personal milestone also. First angel –>IPO for me (I angel invested in Tracxn in 2015-16)…. & chose not to sell in the pre-IPO window:) Besides, I’m a regular user of the platform & can vouch for its utility!

But what really makes Tracxn stand out? – It’s a true/rare global tech play from India – IPOed in India, HQ/OPs in India, but main market is US & Europe!

Most folks in the tech ecosystem know Tracxn, but to newcomers – Tracxn is building a “Bloomberg Terminal for Private Markets”. Public markets have all their data, analyses, trends, and reports out in the open, but that’s not the case with private markets (VC/PE/Angel). This report does a good job of explaining the position.

You can’t publicly find hard numbers or verifiable figures to base your decisions on… everyone is trying to guess and make judgments in the absence of data. That’s where companies like Tracxn come in – they collate data from a bunch of diff sources & create a dashboard that they sell.

The Tracxn IPO is significant for the Indian tech ecosystem –

1) Headquartered in India, but 70% of revenues from US & Europe – true global play!
2) It’s a software driven business (think MARGINAL COST = ZERO), hence lightweight & scalable without huge investments
3) Raised VC $$, but not crazy levels (think #Realistic #Valuation)
4) $8-10MN runrate & profitable (or knocking on those doors)
5) First-mover advantage (think #DataIsTheNewOil)

As @MohapatraHemant (from LightSpeed Ventures) points out in his tweet, this isn’t a case where a big chunk of the value discovery has already happened in the private markets (by VCs). It’s a relatively early IPO, where the company will grow & reward investors in the public space.

Indian stock markets have recently witnessed a string of grossly overvalued tech/ecommerce IPOs that make them question the very rationale of the Silicon Valley originated VC playbook/model. IPOs like Tracxn can help soothe such misgivings & help folks internalize how it really works!

Originally posted on Twitter https://twitter.com/amitranjan/status/1582996280443170816

MapMyIndia IPO

To be a defacto technology superpower, India needs a 1000 MapMyIndias!

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MapmyIndia goes public today… this is a big day not only for the company, but also for India’s tech ecosystem. Here’s why

  • This is a “defacto” tech product company that started making digitalmaps in 1995 (before Google was even born) #NotMeToo
  • I emphasize the word “defacto”, because this isn’t a technology enabled play like ecommerce, nor a foreign market focused Indian SAAS startup… it’s a technology platform company that was born/bred in and for India [this is my earlier essay on how India lacks platform companies]
  • It’s a clear market leader in India’s B2B mapping space, as opposed to B2C where Googlemaps is the default choice
  • I also think going forward (on a decadal timeframe), given the emerging geopolitical landscape around big tech dominance, security, privacy, sovereign data protection laws et al, this is one space among others, where foreign players will be at a disadvantage and gradually the ball may start tilting towards Indian players

Incidentally, I wrote about MapmyIndia (15 yrs ago!) way back in 2007 when this blog Webyantra had a diff avatar and was amongst the most widely read blogs about Indian internet & tech. I had forgotten about it, but Rohan’s tweet brought back distant memories!

The stock market pundits will have endless commentary about the IPO – valuation, pricing, low free float, OFS, growth/profitability prospects given Googlemaps etc. But none of that should take us away from the bigger tech picture here – this is the IPO of a homegrown, India originated, #NotMeToo, India centric technology product company.

Congrats to Rohan and his parents for painstakingly building MMI out over the years… they saw this coming 26 years ago! Here’s hoping a thousand MMIs bloom in India… if we want our nation to be a technology super-power! #ProductNation

(Pic credit https://twitter.com/BSEIndia/status/1473139794238578691)