Trak.in

About Trak.in

Trak.in is a business and technology news portal publishing from Pune at trak.in. Launched on May 1, 2007 by founder Arun Prabhudesai, it has spent nearly two decades covering Indian business, startups, technology, telecom and personal finance — publishing more than 20,000 articles in the process. Operated under the parent company Armoks Interactive, the portal built its reputation on fast, opinionated coverage of the Indian startup ecosystem, telecom wars and policy developments affecting business. In 2018, Mohul Ghosh joined as co-founder and CEO, bringing professional management to the founder-led operation. For readers seeking business news with an independent, often contrarian voice, Trak.in has been a distinctive presence in Indian digital media.

Founding

Trak.in was launched on May 1, 2007 by Arun Prabhudesai, a Pune-based entrepreneur and blogger who saw the opportunity for independent business journalism online. The founding era — before the startup boom, before Jio, before the smartphone revolution — required conviction: Indian business blogging was a lonely field in 2007. Prabhudesai built the site article by article, establishing a voice that was faster and more opinionated than the pink papers. The May 2007 launch date makes Trak.in one of India's oldest continuously operating business blogs — a veteran of transformations that killed many contemporaries.

The 2007 founding context is instructive: Indian business blogging barely existed, the startup ecosystem was nascent, and the idea that a Pune-based blogger could build a business publication rivalling the pink papers seemed fanciful. Prabhudesai's persistence through the lean years — building audience article by article before the traffic existed to monetise — reflects the classic blogger's faith: that quality and consistency compound. By the time India's startup boom created mass demand for business blogging, Trak.in had a half-decade head start.

Arun Prabhudesai

Prabhudesai, the founder, is a distinctive figure in Indian digital media: an entrepreneur-blogger who built a business publication without legacy media backing. His writing — direct, data-informed, unafraid of strong opinions — set the site's tone. He has been a visible commentator on Indian startup and telecom developments, and his personal brand is inseparable from the publication's. The founder-led model gives Trak.in its character: the site reads like the work of someone with skin in the game rather than a committee-produced product.

Startup coverage

Startup coverage became the portal's signature beat as India's ecosystem exploded in the 2010s: funding announcements, shutdowns, analyses of business models, and commentary on the personalities and politics of the startup world. Trak.in covered the Flipkart-Snapdeal era, the food-delivery wars, the fintech boom and the funding winter with a consistent scepticism toward hype. Its willingness to call out inflated valuations and doomed business models distinguished it from the cheerleading that characterised much startup coverage. For founders and investors, it offered an independent — sometimes uncomfortable — mirror.

The sceptical stance toward startup hype produced some of the site's most memorable journalism: questioning inflated valuations, predicting the collapse of unsustainable models, and documenting the shutdowns that the cheerleading press ignored. This contrarianism served readers — particularly small investors and job-seekers — who needed honest assessments rather than promotional coverage. The site's willingness to be unpopular with the ecosystem it covered demonstrated genuine editorial independence: it answered to readers, not to the founders and funders who were its subjects.

Telecom and technology

Telecom is another core beat: the portal has covered India's telecom wars — the Jio disruption, the Vodafone Idea crisis, 5G auctions, tariff battles — with detailed, consumer-relevant reporting. Technology coverage spans gadgets, internet policy, digital payments and the platform economy. The telecom beat, in particular, showcases the site's utility journalism: explaining what tariff changes, spectrum auctions and regulatory decisions mean for ordinary consumers and businesses. In a sector where policy directly affects a billion phone users, this explanatory work has genuine public value.

The Jio disruption of 2016-2019 was the telecom beat's defining story: the portal covered the price wars, the incumbent crisis, the consolidation wave and the consumer windfall with sustained expertise. Few stories better illustrated the site's utility journalism — explaining what free data meant for consumers, what the shakeout meant for investors, and what the regulatory battles meant for the industry. The Jio era validated the decision to treat telecom as a core beat: it was the biggest business story of the decade.

Business and policy

Beyond startups and telecom, the portal covers Indian business broadly: corporate developments, economic policy, taxation, banking and personal finance. Its policy coverage — analysing government decisions affecting business, from demonetisation to digital regulations — brings the founder's opinionated lens to questions of political economy. The personal-finance content serves the site's audience of professionals and entrepreneurs: practical guidance on money in an economy undergoing rapid formalisation and digitisation.

Mohul Ghosh and professionalisation

In June 2018, Mohul Ghosh joined as co-founder and CEO, marking the site's transition from pure founder-blog to professionally managed media company. Ghosh, an MBA from IMT Ghaziabad with experience at companies including Videocon, brought operational discipline to the editorial passion. The partnership — founder's voice plus professional management — is the classic maturing path for successful blogs. Under the Armoks Interactive parent company, the operation gained corporate structure while preserving its editorial character.

The 20,000-article archive represents a distinctive historical asset: a continuous, opinionated record of Indian business's digital transformation, from the pre-smartphone era through every subsequent upheaval. Business historians studying India's startup boom, telecom revolution or digital-payments transformation will find in Trak.in's archive a contemporaneous account — written in real time, with the biases and insights of the moment preserved. Few publications offer such a complete run of the recent economic past.

Editorial voice

The site's voice is its brand: fast, opinionated, conversational, unafraid to take positions. Where legacy business papers hedge, Trak.in declares; where PR-driven coverage celebrates, it questions. This voice attracts a loyal readership that values independence over access — readers who want to know what the founder really thinks, not what sources want them to hear. The trade-off of the opinionated model is the occasional overreach, but the site's longevity suggests the audience considers the trade worthwhile.

The founder-plus-professional-CEO structure that emerged in 2018 reflects the maturation challenge facing all successful blogs: preserving the voice that built the audience while adding the operational discipline that scale demands. Ghosh's corporate experience complemented Prabhudesai's editorial instincts — the classic pairing of the blogger's authenticity with the manager's systems. The structure's endurance suggests the partnership found the balance that many founder-led media ventures miss.

Scale and archive

With more than 20,000 articles published over nearly two decades, Trak.in has built a formidable archive: a running history of Indian business's digital age, from the pre-startup-boom years through Jio, UPI, the funding cycles and beyond. This archive is both a journalistic record and a search asset — years of indexed content drawing steady traffic. Few Indian business blogs can match this depth of continuous coverage.

Digital presence

Trak.in publishes at trak.in and distributes through social media, newsletters and search. Its content — optimised for the questions Indian business readers actually ask — performs strongly in search, and its social following amplifies breaking stories. The site's endurance through multiple eras of digital media — from RSS to social to algorithmic feeds — demonstrates adaptability: the voice stayed constant while the distribution evolved.

Place in Indian business media

Trak.in represents the independent blogger tradition in Indian business journalism: a founder-led, opinionated, Pune-based publication that has outlasted countless better-funded competitors. In a business media landscape split between legacy pink papers and startup-cheerleading blogs, it carved a third path — sceptical, fast, and accountable only to its readers. For nearly two decades, it has documented Indian business with independence and attitude. Its official website is trak.in.