“Indian innovations are capturing global attention, yet the ecosystem has long suffered from a lack of reliable and accessible data,” says Prof Thillai Rajan, founder of startup YNOS Venture Engine and head of the Centre for Research on Start-ups and Risk Financing (CREST) at IIT Madras.YNOS Venture Engine is a platform providing startup funding data and analytics. Incubated at IIT Madras, the startup has built a science-based startup intelligence database and aims to make it accessible to founders nationwide through affordable subscriptions.CREST, an Institute of Eminence research centre at IIT Madras, created a comprehensive database of India’s startup and innovation ecosystem over three to four years. It focuses on the financing of innovation and entrepreneurship, with the goal of generating evidence-based policy recommendations and providing globally prominent data on the Indian startup ecosystem. YNOS serves as the commercialisation arm for the centre’s science-based research, in keeping with IIT-M’s approach to research commercialisation.“After developing a high-quality data platform, we realised commercialising it could help various stakeholders, including investors, policymakers and startups. YNOS acts as the marketing and product development arm of the data platform, taking it to different stakeholders,” Rajan said.Instead of focusing almost exclusively on funding and late-stage ventures, YNOS maps the entire value chain of the startup ecosystem. Rajan added that there is a strong emphasis on early-stage ventures, where data scarcity is greatest.“Today, many programmes encourage startups to be part of an incubator before they can actually qualify for funding. We provide a comprehensive overview of the incubator landscape by profiling approximately 1,500 active incubators nationwide, which is not available in the market. Moreover, YNOS maintains an exclusive focus on startups rather than lumping them together in generic private company databases, recognising that innovative startups have distinct needs from general SMEs.”The company has raised approximately 6 crore from various institutional and angel investors, including Gyan Circle Ventures, Venture Intelligence and prominent individuals such as Gopal Srinivasan and Arun Jain. YNOS is currently focusing on scaling up business development and domestic outreach across India’s startup ecosystem, with plans for international expansion through licensing its framework.In its next stage, the company plans to add an AI-powered natural language query layer to simplify access for users overwhelmed by massive datasets. This will enable users to conduct complex, granular searches — for instance, finding venture capital-funded founders aged 35 to 45 in Mumbai — through simple conversational prompts.Being founder-focused is what differentiates YNOS from other data platforms, according to the company. “Historically, high-quality startup intelligence was prohibitively expensive and accessible to institutional investors and market analysts. We wanted to democratise this data across the entire startup ecosystem, ensuring founders, including those in remote regions, have access to the same calibre of insights as those in major hubs like Bengaluru or Mumbai,” Rajan said. YNOS focuses on affordable pricing to target a large customer base rather than relying on a high-priced, enterprise-only model.By connecting founders to an extensive network of roughly 50,000 angel investors and 6,000 VCs, YNOS says it has enabled subscribing startups and incubators to secure approximately 4,000 crore in total investment.YNOS is also transitioning from a traditional startup database into an innovation platform. The platform aims to provide market access by using its dataset to match corporate problem statements directly with startup solutions.“Traditional matchmaking platforms post open challenges and hope the right startups see them, but we approach it the other way around. We have a dataset of over 340,000 startups. If a corporation comes to us with a problem statement, such as solving boiler corrosion, we can facilitate matchmaking immediately. We are building a continuous B2B feedback loop where corporate demand meets startup innovation, creating a true data supermarket for the entire ecosystem.”
