Why global B2B-data tools fail on India
ZoomInfo, Apollo, Cognism, Lusha cover at best 200K Indian companies. The country has 1.89 million. Here is exactly what they miss.
Open Apollo, search "companies in India". You will see somewhere between 80,000 and 200,000 results, depending on which filters you have on. Open ZoomInfo and you will see a similar number. Open Cognism and the number drops further. Then open the MCA21 portal and run a search for active companies registered between 2014 and 2025. You will get more than 1.4 million results, and the country has 1.89 million active companies in total.
The gap is not random. Global tools are biased toward English-speaking, web-present, urban firms that show up on LinkedIn and on tech-employer lists. They are biased toward IT services, BPO, and SaaS. They miss the rest of the economy: 218,000 LLPs, 482,000 MSMEs visible on Udyam, 218,000 IEC holders shipping out of 13 ports.
There are three reasons. First, source. Apollo and ZoomInfo bought their India coverage from third-party aggregators that themselves sampled from a few large web sources. They never ingested MCA21, never ingested DGFT, never ingested Udyam. Second, language. A company called "ओरिजा एग्रो एक्सपोर्ट्स प्राइवेट लिमिटेड" on its GST certificate and "Oryza Agro Exports Private Limited" on its website appears as two different records in these tools, or only the English one, or neither. Third, freshness. Global tools refresh on quarterly cycles. MCA filings happen daily.
Kestrel takes a different posture. Start from the registries (MCA21, GSTN, Udyam, DGFT, ICEGATE). Dedup across identifiers (CIN, GSTIN, IEC, Udyam). Carry the Devanagari name forward. Re-verify on a per-source cadence (weekly for MCA, monthly for GST, weekly for DGFT). And surface the source and verified date on every field.
This produces coverage at 9x the global tools and freshness at the field level. It also produces a different prospecting motion: instead of asking "which Indian companies in IT have 50 to 200 employees?" (the global-tool question), you ask "which exporters of textile chapter 52 shipped to a new destination this week?" That second question, Apollo cannot answer.
The lesson is not that global tools are bad at their job. The lesson is that they are good at the global job, and India is a different job. Build the India tool from the India sources, or pay 20x the price for a slice of the data.
Kestrel is the India-first GTM data engine. Search 1.89 million active companies, track 15 buying-signal types, and call the public enrichment API.
Try Kestrel free