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
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. 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.
“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. Being founder-focused is what differentiates YNOS from other data platforms, according to the company. 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 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. 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. 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. YNOS focuses on affordable pricing to target a large customer base rather than relying on a high-priced, enterprise-only model.
“Historically, high-quality startup intelligence was prohibitively expensive and accessible to institutional investors and market analysts. “Today, many programmes encourage startups to be part of an incubator before they can actually qualify for funding.