Earnings Call Transcript - XNSE:TRACXN 2026-11-04

Siddharth Grewal, Host

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for joining us today on the first quarter, FY27, second quarter, FY27, Earnings Call of Traction Technologies Limited. First of all, I would like to extend our warmest wishes to all of you and your families for a very happy, safe, and prosperous Diwali. On behalf of Systematics, Siddharth Grewal and Ashish Das would like to thank the Management of Traction for giving us the opportunity to host this earnings call. Today on the call we have with us Ms. Neha Singh, co-founder, chairperson and managing director, Mr. Abhishek Goyal, co-founder, vice chairman and executive director, and Mr. Prashant Chandra, chief financial officer. I would now like to hand over the call to Neha to give opening remarks and take us through the PPT. And after that, we will open it up for Q&A. Please use the raise hand option to ask the question or you can also submit your questions in the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. Thanks. And with that, over to you, Neha.

Neha Singh, Other

Thanks, Laksiddharth. Hello, everyone. A very warm welcome to everyone who is joining us today. We are here for the earnings call for the second quarter of the financial year FY27. We are excited to present our results. And in terms of the format, it will be similar to the previous calls that we'll run through a short presentation, which will last about 15 to 20 minutes, covering the key highlights, which will be followed by a Q&A session. A quick recap on our business. For those who are joining us for the first time, Traction is a data and software platform for the private markets. So if you look at the parallel public market, it has created multiple large data companies, many of which are very highly profitable and cash rich companies. As private markets in the parallel become larger and important, they will also create similar platforms and we are building a global platform in this space. If you look at our customer base, this includes investment industry, which includes your venture capital funds, private equity fund, investment banks, as well as your M&A and innovation teams of large Fortune 500 corporations. Also, it's a global platform, so nearly half of our revenue is international, and we have customers in over 50 countries. I would like to begin by summarizing the financial performance for Q2 and H1 FY27. Revenue from operations in Q2 was 21.3 crore, which is a 1.1% increase on a Q&Q basis. On profitability, EBITDA was negative 5.9 crore and PAT was negative 4.1 crore. Please note this also includes all the non-cash expense, primarily ESOP charge, and we'll also cover the adjusted view in the next slide. Deferred revenue at the end of Q2 FY27 was 38.1 crore, which is a 9% year-on-year increase. By segment, India revenue grew by 6.9% on a Q1Q basis, and internationally stood at 10 crore. Customer accounts grew by 13% to 2,419. Cash-in-cash equivalents stood at a healthy level of 86 crore, nearly. On this slide, we have provided the more detail as well as the historical version numbers for revenue and profitability, and you can go through it for more details. Another metric that we'd like to share is what portion of the incremental revenue flows into the bottom line. In Q2, we did not see margin expansion because we are investing in growth. But historically, if you see, as soon as the growth accelerates, the margins improve quickly. So we have converted as high as 80% of the incremental revenue into incremental EBITDA. So once the growth re-accelerates, we expect this pattern to repeat, driving a non-linear EBITDA expansion. On the cost side, the total expense for H1, FI27 was 52.7 crores. On the right-hand side, we have given the key components of it, which is similar to what you have seen in the previous quarter. So bulk of the cost, about 86% of the total cost is your team cost. And, you know, our entire team is in-house, there's no outsourced or contract workforce. The second largest item is your cloud hosting cost, driven by the data processing and analytics work that we do. And the third is basically your end cost. A point worth noting is that we do not have a large paid marketing expense line item because we are able to use a lot of data to generate organic traffic. Moving to our revenue growth, both customer accounts and users continue to grow at a healthy pace. We closed September 26 at 2,419 accounts, which is 13% year-on-year increase. Number of users reached 6,854, which is a 16% year-on-year increase. So we continue to acquire customers as well as penetrate within the existing accounts. Moving to some of the other financial matrices, FCF for H1, FI27 was negative 6.1 crore, cash and cash equivalents stood at nearly 86 crores. Moving to default revenue, it stood at 38.1 crore at the end of Q2, which is up 9% year-on-year. Moving to some other details of the customer base, starting with a split by type. So at the end of Q2, 49% of our accounts were from the investment industry, which includes primarily private market investors like VC funds, venture capital funds, private equity funds, investment banks, family offices, accelerators and incubators, etc. 45% were corporates, primarily your corporate development teams, M&A teams, innovation teams, strategy and sales teams, as well as consulting companies. The remaining were others, like education institutes, government agencies, so we continue to have a fairly healthy spread across the investment industry, as well as the corporates. So this slide gives an expanded summary of the titles within the investment ecosystem and the corporates that we work with. So this gives us a large addressable market to tap into. And as you can see, we cut across a dozen distinct customer segments, which is why we have been able to build a vertical specialist team for each. And this is a playbook that we invest in. We'll also cover subsequently in this slide. In terms of the geographical split, 48% of the revenue in H1 FY27 was from outside India. We have customers spanning 50 countries. Our top five markets per customer accounts are India, US, UK, Singapore, and Germany. A quick word on the broader market environment. So total dollar invested, if you see in the private markets, that is rising. So global tech funding for 2026 is actually on track to become the highest in the decade, driven by primarily the mega AI rounds. The deal volume, however, is at a 10-year low, both in India and international. Global late-stage funding also continues to see a sort of year-on-year increase. Coming to the global M&A, the rebound here is actually much stronger. So 2026, you know, it continues with a very good momentum and the current run rate suggests that this year could actually become the second highest year after the 2021 peak, both in terms of the global M&A deal value as well as the IED advisory fees. Moving on from the financials, so coming to the key parts, I'd like to walk through some of the key highlights from Q2, FI27, and some of the interesting growth initiatives that we are working on, starting with a very repeatable playbook that is working well for us. So I'll start with the revenue of the India overall. So if you look at India, which now accounts for over half of our revenue. You will see that we have steadily accelerated our growth rate over the last two years. So on a Q1Q basis, you can see the acceleration. Last quarter, which is Q2, India grew by nearly 7% on a Q1Q basis, which is an annualized run rate of 30% growth rate. So this is a fairly good trajectory. And one of the key drivers for this growth, and this sort of steadily increasing growth is because of the investments that we've made in data and sales across our vertical teams, right, and through a growth playbook that we've implemented across these verticals. So coming into, you know, what this sort of playbook is, and last quarter, we talked about, you know, briefly about, you know, sort of this playbook. So it's a very predictable and repeatable three-phase growth playbook. So we cater to about two dozen customer segments. So in phase one, we launch a specialized BU team aligned to that particular customer segment. So in this phase, which typically takes about two quarters, we see a roughly 50% increase in the pace of new customer acquisition just because of the focus team behind this customer segment. In the second phase, we use what we learn from these vertical sales team to make our data and product best in class for that segment, right? So to actually fill in the small gaps that we see for this particular segment, this typically takes us about three to four quarters, and we are able to see a very notable increase in our win rates, right, as soon as, you know, this starts happening. Phase three, which is like the scale up phase. So once we have the improved win rates, we scale our sales team, typically to about four times the initial size, right? And this helps us drive a very marked increase in the segment's growth rate, and as well as market share. So typically, we are able to acquire about one to 2% incremental market share every month. And just to show you this in action, so, you know, we have seen this sort of play in a few verticals now, a good case study is investment banks, India vertical. When we launched the vertical team, we saw the new customer acquisition pickup almost immediately. Subsequently, in the phase two, we closed the gaps by making our offering sort of best in class for bankers. For this, we launched LiveDeal so that bankers can source M&A and fundraise ready companies. We enriched our investor database to support their outreach. We also expanded our coverage of private company financials, which is now best in the market for both India as well as globally. As a result, our win race improved substantially, and we grew our new customer acquisition to around 20 a month, which is nearly double to what it was at the starting. We are now in phase three, right, in this particular BU, where we are scaling the sales team and driving upgrades within the existing customers as well, as well as new customer acquisition, and we have gained around 1% incremental market share every month for the last 12 months. So if you just look at the last quarter, Q2, this segment's revenue grew 11% on a Q1Q basis. That's an annualized run rate of well over 40%, right? Up from about 20% growth rate that we had seen last financial year. So, you know, and increasingly more as the new sales team sort of becomes more productive, we expect this growth to sort of accelerate. So this is a good case study that it's also there. And there are a few verticals in which this is played out. And this is the same playbook that we are applying across the BUs. And as you can see from the slide, the different vertical teams are in different phases. So most of the growth that you've seen in India in the previous ones is actually just from the two BUs that are in the scale-up phase. And as more of the business units move up the scale-up phase in the upcoming quarters, we expect our overall growth rates to sort of improve meaningfully. We are now applying the same playbook also to international geographies. So in India, we invested in sales and data across the last two to three years. And those investments have started to show results, you know, within a few quarters, actually, since we started. And India is now growing, as we mentioned, at an annualized run rate of nearly 30%. So internationally, we are following the same strategy, though we are at an earlier stage. So we are making similar investments in data and sales across the international business units. And we are already seeing encouraging early signs from some of the units. And we expect these investments to start showing up in our international growth rates in the coming quarters. So these investments have also led to a one-time cost step up. And once they are in place, we also expect, which we expect to happen within the next one to two quarters, we expect that the subsequent cost growth should be back to our historical levels, which has been in the low single digit levels, right? So taken together, this also puts us back to sort of part of profitability. Moving on to the next initiative, which is scaling our sales team. So one of the initiatives that we had talked about earlier is scaling our GTM teams, primarily our sales team. So as we can see, our GTM team has grown both in terms of the absolute size as well as share the overall headcount. So sales and marketing today accounts for nearly 30% of our total headcount, which is up from 25% same quarter last year. So that's a meaningful shift towards a sales-led growth. And we had mentioned earlier that we are scaling our sales team to accelerate the growth across the vertical business units. We had set out in the beginning of the year with a plan to nearly double our closing sales team from 34 at the beginning of the year, 2026, to around 60 by December end of this year. This covers both India and international markets with our India-based teams also selling to international geographies. So we are pleased to share that we have completed most of this expansion. As of September, 2026, we have onboarded nearly 56 of the 60 planned closing sales team members. And as the team members sort of ramp up and become more productive, we expect this expansion to drive meaningful growth in the new customer acquisition. Moving on to the next initiative, which is sort of exponentially increasing the data sets and our coverage. So previously, we talked about data augmentation as one of the key things that we do in phase two, right, to increase the win rates. So at the India level, there have been several initiatives underway. Beyond the private company financials, which is now best in class in India. For investment banks, we also introduced a proprietary industry taxonomy covering nearly 3 million legal entities to enable deeper sector-wise benchmarking. Another bucket of requests, primarily from venture capital funds, was deeper founder signal coverage for early-stage investors. So for this, we have launched feed of companies founded by alumni of top college, top companies, by serial entrepreneurs, as this is becoming an increasingly important segment for early-stage investors to track. We've also expanded our coverage of cap tables and shareholding of private companies by more than five times, taking it to near complete. These dataset launches contributed to our growth acceleration that we saw in the previous quarters, and we expect this trend to continue because a lot of them have also recently got added. On the international front, we have launched several datasets over the months. One that recently went live is our coverage of stealth companies, something that clients have been consistently asking about, which is to source early-stage deals before their public launch, and this is already showing good early results. We have launched Talent Signals, which highlights founders from top colleges, top companies, serial founders. For investment banks, we have launched estimated revenues for private companies. And valuations of historical M&A deals. Both were among the most requested data sets for this investment banking segment. Additionally, we have also expanded our coverage of headcount data and growth trends, which now spans more than 3.4 million entities. In the UK, we have expanded our coverage of private company financials to 5.2 million entities, which is 16x since March 25, taking to near complete coverage. So we expect these launches to also to have sort of meaningful impact in the international growth rates. Our coverage of regulatory data and private companies across job bookings continue to expand rapidly, starting with the private company financials. Here we have grown our coverage nearly 11x. We now have 3.1 million companies with revenue data, 7.5 million companies with detail financials across 20 plus countries. Investors, next is cap tables, and so investors use this to track shareholding, valuation, share price data for private companies. So here we have grown our coverage by five times over the last nine months, and we now track more than 1.8 million companies with a shareholding factor across over 15 countries. We cover 66 million legal entities across US, UK, Japan, India, Australia, and a lot of other countries. And we also keep adding more regulatory data sets on these legal entities, which includes things like financials, loans and charges data, legal cases, directorship, holding, etc. So this also helps us deepen our penetration across the customer segments. And just a point to note here, we've added all these data sets without significantly increasing our headcount in the data production, which is thanks to the automation and AI we have been able to build in our data infrastructure. So this helps us scale very efficiently. Beyond some of the business units that we talked about earlier, like investment bank, we've also launched sort of specialized teams of verticals and several other customer segments that we continue to see sort of good results. So we have listed some of them you can go through in more details to give you just a gist or corporate sales for instances and other segments, which basically serves the sales teams of large corporates for business development use case. For this segment, the India revenue grew by nearly 23% year on year in Q2. M&A is another vertical that is starting to do, you know, fairly well for us. And these are just a few of the live verticals that we have. And just to summarize, the vertical team playbook continues to do well for us. So as DAS and other BUs reach their scale-up phase, we expect a meaningful lift in the overall growth rates across India and international. Moving to the next initiative, which is AI-native access to traction data. So this is another one of the key initiatives, which is basically enabling users to access Traction data in their AI native workflows. So here we have launched three things. The first is Traction MCP for AI tools. So now you can have your Traction sort of MCP listed on Claude and ChatGPT marketplaces. And it also works with tools like Gemini, Cursor. And we have also enabled sort of faster responses, lower token consumption, you know, for this. So what that means is that all your paid customers can now access reliable real-time company intelligence from Traction's proprietary database directly within their cloud and other AI workflows. The second thing that we have launched is your AI assistant, which is on Traction platform itself, that lets users ask Traction's data, you know, in plain English, right? So basically, the AI assistant handles your data querying and more complex tasks as well, right? So you can actually do that right from the platform itself. The third thing is that we are also working on agentic workflows, which combines investors' in-house data with tractions data to address the most common use cases the investors have. So these are sort of ready-to-use agents for tasks the investors do more frequently, like your deeper diligence, competition benchmarking, less sector landscaping, building a scouting list, and many more. They can also be customized to a fund's internal processes and templates, so together, these will make our data significantly more accessible inside the customer's AI native workflows, and which helps us also in embedding more deeply in the customer workflows and becoming an overtime segment we expect to become a meaningful revenue segment for us. Moving on to some of the other initiatives for PLG and customer acquisition, so first, organic search traffic, we continue to see high and increasing volumes of organic traffic with over 17 million visits during the first half of the year. The current run rate is nearly 30 million. Second is TractionLite. We have now crossed over around 3,500 users sign up since launch. Another growth initiative is press coverage. In H1, FY27, we had over 2,100 press mentions. And that mention sort of grew 30% on a Q&Q basis. So, you know, it's a fairly large number. It also helps us strengthen our brand as a trusted data source and helps us convert more sales. So to summarize our three key growth areas are as follows. So India growth, if you see, you know, that is accelerating. India now accounts for more than half of our overall revenue. And the growth here has accelerated to, you know, now nearly 30% annualized run rate based on this quarter's Q&Q growth. And we are now applying the same playbook also to the international business units. The second is that we have built a very repeatable three-phase playbook. So it helps us lift both the growth as well as market share within each of the segments. And this is already proven in a couple of segments, like Investment Bank India, which is now growing at actually nearly 50% annualized run rate. We are now applying it to a dozen other live business units in India as well as international. And as more of these business units reach the scale-up phase, we expect a meaningful improvement in our overall growth. Third on the sales front, we had planned to nearly double our sales capacity in the beginning of the year, and we are already nearly completed most of this expansion. So we grew the closing sales team from nearly 34 in the beginning of the year to 56 now, and we'll end up slightly over 60 by December end. So this helps us sort of increase our new customer acquisition pace. On the data front, we continue to strengthen our data lead and make us best in class in the prioritized segments. In India, for instance, we are best in class in private company financials, and we have added many more data sets also recently. On the international front, we have launched a lot of other data sets like coverage on stealth companies, early stage founders, talent signals, and there are many more launches which are there in the pipeline in the upcoming months as well. Another initiative is your AI-native access to traction data, which includes your MCP connectors, in-platform AI assistant partnerships with AI-native platforms, right? And in terms of profitability, we have taken a one-time core step up to fund some of these investments. Once this is complete, we expect the cost growth to actually return to low single digit, right? So overall, we have a strong set of growth initiatives in place, and we expect the financial year 527 to start showing the impact of some of these investments, both in terms of improved growth rate, as well as expanded market share across our key segments. So this covers most of the key updates from the recent period. In the subsequent slides we have also included some other additional KPI and detailed financials. Please feel free to go through that in more details. With that, I'll pause and I'll pass it back to Ashish for the Q&A section.

Ashish Das, Host

Thank you, Neha. And now we'll start the Q&A session. Participants can raise their hands or write down their questions in the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. Once we call out your name, you can unmute yourself and ask your questions. We will wait for a minute. Yeah. Okay, we have the first question from Sanjay Sut. Would you like to unmute yourself and ask your question?

Sanjay, Analyst — Private Investor

And my first question is that you have taken very good initiatives for universities and very strong growth also you have. Now, in terms of value, how much percentage it is of the total revenue?

Neha Singh, Other

So this would be a single, so thanks, Sanjay, for that question. So university as a segment would be single digit percentage for us. There are a lot of other segments which are probably also growing faster for us, which includes, for instance, your investment banking segment. In fact, even VC as a segment, which was slower probably till two quarters back, there were some data sets that we had sort of added for this segment. And, you know, now that is also a segment that is growing well for us. And there are some other segments as well. So corporate sales is, for instance, growing, you know, it's growing well for us more than 20% year on year growth and like M&A is starting to grow. But like there are other segments which are probably more sizable, which we have shown up is probably in the scale up phase, which is where we are also sort of investing in some of the data sets that we mentioned about. Hopefully, that answers the question, Sanjay.

Sanjay, Analyst — Private Investor

No, actually, in terms of revenue, if we can get some firm idea, like suppose you have X is a total revenue, and this is having some strong growth, but in terms of value, what You mean to say universities in specific, right? Yes.

Neha Singh, Other

So universities, yeah. So talking about university as a BU, as a business unit, so that's actually very good sort of strategic business unit for us. In terms of the revenue, it's probably only single digit percentage. But, you know, this is actually also a great marketing funnel for us. To give you an example, you know, even in our B schools, we got a lot of time we got introduced to some of the public market data platforms, you know, back when we were there in the B schools. And similarly, you know, for instance, you know, here when we work with a lot of top universities, a lot of the students which actually enter into the investment banking segment and the private equity segment or the venture capital segment, a lot of them are actually, you know, graduates of some of these institutes. And we've also been able to sort of acquire customers wherein the student at first use fraction, you know, in their university. And today, actually, you know, we are glad to have sort of like most of the top IAMs as a customer, Stanford has been a customer, there are a lot of other top universities, you know, that are that have been the customers. So, so, you know, in addition to the revenue segment, it's also a great sort of funnel for us. Yeah, Ashish, we can go to the next question. Okay.

Ashish Das, Host

Yeah, sure. So our next question comes from Abdul. Yeah, Abdul, you can unmute yourself and ask your questions.

Abdul, Analyst — JP Morgan

Hello, good afternoon. Hello?

Neha Singh, Other

Yeah, hi, Abdel, we can hear you.

Abdul, Analyst — JP Morgan

Yeah, hi, hi. See, my question is that you have been, like, I have noticed that since 2023, the revenues have been flat. It's around 20 crores per quarter. So what's your plan on increasing this? This is my first question. Second question is that I have been noticing that the customer accounts have been on increase, okay, but it is not translating into revenue. So could you shed some light on that?

Neha Singh, Other

Sure. Thanks, Abdul, for that question. Just to take the first one. So, you know, we have mentioned that, like, for instance, if you look at our industry, and we also, you know, sort of share data on that, if you look at our industry, so venture capital used to be like VC used to be our largest segment, right? And, you know, that segment, you know, did have sort of a slowdown in terms of deal activity. So even if you look at today, the deal activity, in terms of just the number of transactions happening, that is at a 10 year low. Both in India as well as globally, right? And so what we had to do is, you know, actually, probably prioritize some of the other segments. So we had to sort of, you know, change the customer mix, prioritize some of the other segments, which is what we did, right? So it probably takes us about two to three quarters to sort of build the offering, argument the offering for that particular segment, you know, launch the team and then do that. So that is what we had to sort of, you know, do in the last, I would say two years. And, you know, but I would say that, you know, we are actually And we're actually sort of seeing results of that very well, you know, in select, like if you look at just India as a geography, right, so that has grown at nearly 20% in the first half, and the current run rate is actually even higher. So if you look at the Q12, it's nearly 7%, which is actually analyzes to about 30%, right? So there we had launched a lot of the business units and the other segments are actually, you know, had sort of other customer segments are sort of growing well for us. So that is a change that we had to sort of do. But, you know, right now, you know, I think that we are already able to show that in numbers, you know, in terms of the India view. International is what, you know, we have mentioned that, you know, we are also replicating that in the international. It's a little earlier stage than I would say in the India view. But, you know, it probably takes us about, you know, say, three to four quarters in augmenting the data sets. But we're already seeing sort of good early results in some of the pods and we expect. One or two of the ports, which is your business units to start showing the signs as the India units have been showing in, you know, probably fairly soon in like a quarter or so. Right. So that's only first part on the revenue. The second part is basically, you know, the customer account growth and, you know, and how that translates to sort of revenue growth. So our customer account growth, you know, have been like fairly high, I would say in the last two years. One of the reasons is that, you know, our customer mix had changed and there were a lot of new segments that we had sort of started to acquire. But actually, you know, like, right now, if you see, you know, I think it should probably, you know, like, in a couple of quarters, it will probably become similar to, you know, your, your revenue will sort of catch up to the same rate as the customer account growth, right? Customer, we had sort of started acquiring, you know, we had changed our customer mix. So we had started acquiring a lot of customers in the newer segments, wherein the price point was slightly lower, right? A lot of the growth had also happened in India, where the ESP is actually half of what is there in the international geography. So because of it, you had also seen that growth sort of accelerate. And this is how the playbook is. Like, even when we talked about, you know, when we start working on a particular business unit, we start seeing the customer acquisition to grow faster initially, and then that follows by the revenue acceleration. So this is how, you know, you can expect to sort of see this also going forward.

Abdul, Analyst — JP Morgan

I have a follow-up question on that. Can I ask? Yes.

Abhishek Goyal, Chairman

Yes, please.

Abdul, Analyst — JP Morgan

Yeah. So basically, so first thing you just said, like the deal volume is low on a 10-year low. That's correct. I agree with that. But you have been saying that the VC and your IP segments have been growing on. Okay, so like, what services do you provide them differently? Because what I understand is that Jackson is a data platform. So what are the, like, how do you differentiate it? You're providing a service to investment banking something and venture capital. So this is the first thing. And second thing was that on the customer account, as you have said, so I believe that in this, there are accounts which are paid and which are for free, maybe some free accounts are also there. The customers were not paying anything. They're just utilizing the free services. So can you provide a breakup of that also?

Neha Singh, Other

Okay, cool. Yeah, thanks, Abdul, for that question. So that's a very interesting question. Like, you know, how does our platform sort of differ for, like, how does data differ for IB versus VC? So that's, you know, so we actually have the same platform that is used, but the data sets that a VC would use is actually different from, you know, an IB. To give you an example, most of the VCs sort of invest in tech, right? So they're looking at a lot of tech coverage, they're looking at tech companies, they're looking at sectors, you know, sectors is probably higher price. Priority to them than, say, the size of the company and, you know, the sector, for instance, if someone is looking to invest in AI companies, someone is looking to invest in defense tech companies, right? Or someone is looking to invest in D2C brands. And these are very early stage as well, right? Like, so, you know, where a company lists, it's probably seven to eight years before the company lists, is when a VC has to reach out to that company, right, to write the first check. Right. So, so the kind of you, so the kind of companies and the kind of data that investors looking at different, right? When you take the example of an investment bank, right? So the kind of data sets that we had to add is, for instance, you know, they are looking at a lot more offline companies, right? Your traditional companies, your hospital chains, your, you know, your large like food and beverage chains, et cetera, right? So they're looking at a lot of Offline companies as well. A big criteria for them is actually your revenue. So they typically like to work with companies beyond a particular revenue size. So we did not used to have the revenue as one of the key data because for VCs, it's actually much lower priority. But for investment bank, that is a very high priority. So we actually took about two to three quarters to add just the private company financials data for India. Today, we are actually the best in class. So within about, I would say, three to four quarters, we've actually become best in class in that. So it probably takes us some time, but now we added that data set. Another thing is like live deals, right? Like I always also want to see, okay, which companies are looking to sell, which companies are looking for fundraise, right? So that just helps to build the pipeline for them, right? So the platform is the same, but the data sets that makes it very useful for them is actually different. So when we have to prioritize and when we have to grow in that segment and we have to reach to a market share of like 40-50%, then we have to, you know, argument those things. So that is what is, you know, what it takes to for us to sort of build deeper penetration and the data set for each segment. So hopefully that answers your first question, Abdul. Your second question was in terms of the customers and how many are paid and how many are free. So all the customers that we give, the customer count that we give, which is about 2,000 in terms of users. So the customer accounts are basically all your paid customers. We do not include your free customers in the customer account count. The customer count that in terms of the total number of accounts that we share, these are all paid accounts. So hopefully that answers your question, Sabine.

Ashish Das, Host

Okay. Our follow-up questions comes from Sanjay. So, Sanjay, please unmute yourself and ask your questions.

Sanjay, Analyst — Private Investor

Some time back, I had suggested that you can connect with the procurement or supply chain functions of different multinational companies or good industrial houses. They always have need for good companies and many times they are not aware. So, that may help. It was just a suggestion. You can take it or leave it. Like, I thought I'd just put that across because I'm also an old investor. So, yes, I thought I'd put this idea.

Abhishek Goyal, Chairman

Sanjay, we can probably even reach out to you offline and maybe do one-on-one to sort of get more context and nerd more on that.

Sanjay, Analyst — Private Investor

Okay. Right. Fine. And the thing is that since we are hiring so many persons in a peer scheme, how they will be addressing the issue, like how they will get the sale, that's a very basic question. Whether they will be traveling international or over phone or home or how they will address this.

Neha Singh, Other

Right. Yeah. So thanks, Sanjay. That's a very relevant question. So currently, all our sales actually happens remotely, you know, except for like maybe a few segments wherein you need like universities, etc. You need to visit them, including those. Most of our sales happen remotely. At the price points that we are in, people are fine with sort of buying remotely, right? So we have India-based teams that actually sell remotely, even internationally, when we sell to customers in UK, Germany, you know, we have teams which are based out of India and then sell to customers over there. They walk across different time zones. So, you know, we start in the morning, APAC, we have customers in Japan, Singapore, right? So our team basically starts in the morning. And then we also have your, you know, APAC shift, your EMEA shift, and then, you know, the night is the US shift. Teams are based out of India, and then they sell remotely. We've also had, you know, sort of visits, but that's fairly less, I would say, because at the price point at which sort of we enter, people are, you know, find it buying remotely. So, the sales team that we have expanded is actually covering both for the Indian market as well as the international segments that we mentioned about that we are working on, right? And we had sort of also scaled because we were seeing, you know, the results in some of the business units. So, we are actually, you know, as soon as we start seeing that the conversions have improved, then we are able to sort of scale the sales team within those business units.

Sanjay, Analyst — Private Investor

That's a great thing.

Neha Singh, Other

Thanks, Angie.

Ashish Das, Host

Yeah, the next question comes from Anubh Goyal. Yeah, Anubh, please unmute yourself and ask your question.

Anubhav Goyal, Analyst — Cosma Ventures

Yeah, hi, man. So, man, I just want to understand the international strategy better. Like, in the Indian market, our brand is very well known, and we are very strong, and that will keep growing steadily. But, man, for the international market, you know, these platforms like CB Insights, Harmonic, there are so many features beyond just seeing data. And the platforms are so seamless that once you use these platforms, then shifting away from these platforms may not make sense. So, you know, is it time, like, for us to really develop new features for clients? Like, why are we not developing use cases for enter? You know, which would be interested in data from India. It's such a huge market. So just your thoughts on this, sir, for the international market.

Neha Singh, Other

Thanks, Anabha. So, no, that's a very key question. So, in actually international, it's like the same strategy that you pick up a customer segment and we already, for instance, you know, like nearly 48% of our revenue is international. So, there are already some TGs that we are working with. And so, the playbook is the same. So, you pick up a customer segment, you prioritize a customer segment, you firstly launch a vertical team for that particular segment. Earlier, we used to have horizontal teams, you know, primarily the horizontal team. The first phase is, you know, as soon as you have the customer segment focus team, an example for customer segment focus team is, for instance, investment banks in UK, right? Right. So investment bank in India, for instance, is growing very well for us, right? And that continues to grow. Investment bank in UK, right? We can similarly grow well, you know, for instance, in that segment. So we have a customer, we have a team which is behind that. As soon as we launch that, we see sort of increased, you know, slight increase in sort of conversion. The second phase is that we augment our data, right? So for instance, you know, if they need private company financials in UK, you know, then we add your company house data, we augment our coverage over there, we augment our coverage on the companies over there, right? And whatever is sort of required, the top two or three things that is required, you know, in that segment, we prioritize that, we build the data set, it probably takes us about three to four quarters to build a good sort of data. And then, you know, as soon as that starts happening, we actually see sort of increased conversion. So for, you know, like sales conversion, sales to closure conversion. So there you see a marked increase in that closure. And the third is that we sort of scale that. So that cycle is actually fairly same. And I think that, you know, in today's world, I would say that, you know, you know, all these platforms are there, but you know, you still have to constantly, you know, keep delivering sort of best in class for that particular segment, right? Right. So all the new data sets, which is there, you know, sort of deepen your penetration within regulatory data, you know, that is one thing, obviously, and the front end that is there. And, you know, you basically have seamless access to that. But I would say, even the larger platforms, right, like, you know, I don't think it's, you know, there's always, you know, you, you have to basically, you know, become best in class in that segment. And I don't think it's that long a process, probably like just a few quarters, right. And you're able to sort of, you know, start getting I think market share fairly quickly, as soon as that happens, right?

Anubhav Goyal, Analyst — Cosma Ventures

I would say so, even, you know, just specifically for enterprises, because I think it's such a huge market. So for that, maybe you can just share a few comments. Like maybe is that something which we see targeting maybe some years later more aggressively or it's a step-by-step approach or like maybe some disadvantages we have in terms of reaching them out, like the, you know, connecting with them itself is difficult.

Neha Singh, Other

You mean to say the corporates or the enterprises, right?

Anubhav Goyal, Analyst — Cosma Ventures

Yes, yes. Like Fortune 500, Fortune 2000.

Neha Singh, Other

So, yeah.

Abhishek Goyal, Chairman

So on the corporate side, I think we already have pods for M&A teams and innovation teams. And we are starting to see some results. We are still working on the offering there, but we expect in a quarter or two to start delivering good numbers there. And we have also started the team for a lot of sales folks or BD folks also need data on private companies. So we have started to work on that. I think in three to four quarters, that can start to show results. So these are the three segments where we have active teams which are in phase two in terms of building out the product offering for them. And in next two to four quarters, we should see response. We are getting good early signs. In M&A specifically, we are seeing good response from the customer. And innovation and sales we expect to see results in subsequent quarters after M&A is starting to deliver.

Neha Singh, Other

Yeah, so just to add to, you know, to your question, so enterprises corporate is definitely an area of focus for us. And there are two, three departments, you know, as Abhishek mentioned, that we work closely with them, right, that includes your M&A teams, your innovation teams, and also a sales team, right. So these are the TGs that we are going behind. And right, so this is definitely at, you know, in the segment that is prioritized.

Anubhav Goyal, Analyst — Cosma Ventures

Okay, great to hear. Just one more question. Are we working on, you know, maybe like some innovation beyond chatbots, like, you know, we can hire some domain experts, you know, try to prepare very rich. Reports, you know, which users really like. Just if you can speak some, like, any measures we are using to, you know, make the platform better, because on one hand, like, we have so much good data. Like, now in today's world, you know, this making sure the client is using this data very well is very important. And, you know, providing features around it.

Abhishek Goyal, Chairman

So I think in innovation, specifically, we are making an AI scout agent. I think we have constantly gotten feedback from innovation teams that they need a self-serve AI scout. So they usually research on different technologies. So, for example, if somebody wants to track, let's say, ball tracking technology or line marking in sports. So for that, they need an AI scout which can help them figure out five to ten most innovative companies in that market. So we are working on that feature that will help us serve the needs of innovation markets very quickly.

Anubhav Goyal, Analyst — Cosma Ventures

And so this AI now we have like on our own platform that a user can just go on to our platform and put in a query. So is this something which allows us to make like is this something which will allow us to make money also like is there like a top up balance you have to recharge and accordingly like you know.

Abhishek Goyal, Chairman

So, it is helping us in two ways. So, it is helping us sell higher packs. So, we have a pro and power pack. So, those comes with much higher tokens for AI. And secondly, once you exhaust the tokens, there is a provision to buy tokens from us. We have just launched it last month. So, we still have to see early results for that. And we will cover those in subsequent quarterly calls.

Anubhav Goyal, Analyst — Cosma Ventures

Okay, great to hear, sir. All right, wish you the best.

Ashish Das, Host

Yeah. Participants can raise their hands or write down their questions in the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen.

Ariman, Analyst

Hi, can you hear me?

Ashish Das, Host

Ariman, you can ask.

Ariman, Analyst

No, I just wanted to know, say, we at my firm kind of use action, and what do we do when, say, there are five or ten people in the team, but there are only one or two logins, right? How do you optimize for that? Because one person... Or two people need it at once. Right? 10 people don't need it at once. So how do we optimize for, if it's a 10 member team, we can sell them not only just one account or one user, but more in kind of optimizing.

Abhishek Goyal, Chairman

I think today we have APIs available to own a platform where we are able to detect some of these things. IP locations are there. We are able to figure out cities where the customers are logging from. So in most cases, we are able to detect when they are sharing logins. That acts as a trigger for our upgrade team. So we eventually reach out to customers who have most usage and I urge them to buy more seats or move to our full team packs, and that has been a great way for upgrades. So we obviously have some tools in place, but this is one of the biggest signals for us to upgrade our customers. And a large portion of our business is about lending and then expanding across the team. So this is actually one of our most successful Thank you very much.

Ariman, Analyst

So, any anecdotal evidence of this that kind of worked out, just share with us.

Abhishek Goyal, Chairman

Half of our upgrades happen because of this today.

Ariman, Analyst

Oh, okay. Half of them.

Abhishek Goyal, Chairman

So, basically, if the team is using, you reach out to them, a large portion of them agrees and buy the product.

Ariman, Analyst

Okay, you just tell them that you are using multiple accounts at one day.

Abhishek Goyal, Chairman

We tell them that your team is using it, why don't you move to a full team pack, we give them a clean upgrade plan and a lot of times there is an intent to buy. Our customers, segments are among the most paid customers, people, right? So, investment banks, private equity firms, venture capital, they have resources. So, if something is useful for them, if you give them enough proof that people are using, they are going to buy it.

Ariman, Analyst

So thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you.

Neha Singh, Other

Thanks, honey.

Ashish Das, Host

Yeah. Participants can raise their hands or write down their question in the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. As we don't have any further questions, we'll have to close this call now. In case you have any further questions, you can reach out to the management at investor.relationsattraction.com. I will now pass it on to Neha and Avisek to give their closing remarks.

Neha Singh, Other

Thanks. Thanks, Ashish. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Hopefully, we were able to give you a clearer picture of the recent update and our progress and have answered some of your questions. For any follow-up questions that you have, please feel free to reach out to me at neha.traction.com or our team at investor.relations.traction.com. Thank you again for joining us and a very happy Diwali in advance to everyone.

Abhishek Goyal, Chairman

Thank you, everybody.