265% Increase In Funding Of Indian Startups: $42 Billion Raised In 12 Months; #1 City In Funding?

The Indian Tech Unicorn Report 2021 has released which reports that Indian startups have raised $42 billion in 2021, up from $11.5 billion in the previous year.

The report was published by Orios Venture Partners.

New Unicorns

46 unicorns emerged in the country in 2021 alone, some of them including:

• ShareChat
• Cred
• Meesho
• Nazara
• Moglix
• MPL
• Grofers (now Blinkit)
• upGrad
• Mamaearth
• GlobalBees
• Acko
• Spinny 

The addition of 46 unicorns takes the overall tally to 90, more than doubling the total number of unicorns.

Third Largest Unicorn Producer

This makes India the third-largest unicorn hub behind the US (487) and China (301), and ahead of the UK (39).

It also is the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world with about 60,000 startups.

The report says that today, 1 out of 13 unicorns globally comes from India.

Record IPOs

2021 was a record year in terms of Indian startups going public.

11 Indian startups (including 8 unicorns) raised about $7.16 billion through public offerings.

One97 Communication (Paytm) raised India’s largest-ever IPO with an issue size of Rs 18,300 crore (about $2.46 billion).

Decacorns Already Here

The maximum number of unicorns are in the Fintech, e-commerce and SaaS (software as a service) space.

Health-tech, ed-tech, D2C, Gaming and Crypto are also close behind.

Flipkart was the most valuable unicorn ($37.6 billion after raising $3.6 billion in July 2021).

India presently has four decacorns (companies with a valuation of $10 billion and above)- Flipkart, Paytm, Byju’s and Oyo Rooms.

City-Wise Trends

Bengaluru became the city with the most unicorns, having produced 18 unicorns so far.

It’s followed by Delhi at 13, Mumbai at 11 and Jaipur which joined the unicorn city list with CarDekho.

Founder Trends

20 percent of unicorn founders are non-engineers and two-thirds of the Indian unicorns have at least one or more founders from IITs, IIMs or ISB.

The country has 13 female unicorn founders out of which 8 emerged in the year 2021. 

Some of them are:

• Falguni Nayar (Nykaa)
• Gazal Kalra (Rivigo)
• Ruchi Kalra (OfBusiness)
• Divya Gokulnath (Byju’s)
• Ghazal Alagh (MamaEarth) 
• Saritha Katikaneni (Zenoti).

Report Conclusion

These startups, apart from developing innovative solutions and technologies, are also creating large-scale employment opportunities.

Rehan Yar Khan, Managing Partner, Orios Venture Partners said that while the year was marked by an economic downturn in the first half, tech startups found it to be a “tremendously promising year”.

The report validates the value creation that was achieved through innovation in technology, both in terms of IPO and unicorns.