18% Founders Of 500 American Unicorn Startups Are Born In India! Why This Is Important For India?

Out of 1,078 founders across the 500 US unicorns, 90 entrepreneurs were born in India, found by a recent study by Strebulaev, a professor of finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

Significant Presence Of Indian

Interestingly, this finding signals the significant presence of Indian Americans in the country’s startup and tech economy.

Basically the India-born founders were followed by the ones from Israel and Canada.

Ironically, the data comes into the picture when many Indian-based technology professionals are looking to head back home. 

Indian Giving Up On Their American Dream

The reports from last week indicate that Indian immigrants in the US were increasingly giving up on their American dream.

This is basically caused by the visa issues and the lure of a thriving startup industry in India.

 It is noteworthy here that not only startup founders but India-born executives are now running the most powerful tech giants in the US.

Better Performance By Indian Startups

Coming to Indian startups, they have raised $42 billion in 2021, up from $11.5 billion in the previous year, according  to a recent report by venture capital fund Orios Venture Partners.

India saw 46 unicorns (companies with $1 billion or more in valuation) in 2021 alone, as per a report titled ‘The Indian Tech Unicorn Report 2021’.

Some of the newly minted unicorns are Cred, ShareChat, Moglix, Meesho, Nazara, MPL, Grofers (now Blinkit), Mamaearth, GlobalBees, Acko,  upGrad, Spinny and others.

India – Third-Largest Unicorn Hub

With 90 unicorns, India becomes the third-largest unicorn hub, falling behind the countries like the US (487) and China (301) and ahead of the UK (39).

Considering the adding value, Flipkart found to be the most valuable unicorn ($37.6 billion after raising $3.6 billion in July 2021).

On the other hand, Mensa Brands was the fastest to turn unicorn as it took only 6 months to turn unicorn in the November 2021 round after raising the first $50 million round in May 2021.

Further, the report mentions that India has seen four decacorns including Flipkart, Paytm, Byju’s and Oyo Rooms.

Here, decacorns are the companies with a valuation of USD 10 billion and above. 

The report mentions that the year 2021 was a landmark year for Indian startups going public.

In terms of public markets, considering the listed Indian startups,  Zomato has the highest market capitalisation ($14.8 billion)  followed by Nykaa ($13.5 billion) and Freshworks ($6.9 billion).

Cities In Race

If we consider the cities, Bangalore comes out as the ‘Unicorn Hub’ with 18 unicorns emerging from the city in 2021 and 35 in all. 

On top of that it also happens to be the seventh largest unicorn city in the world. 

After that, Delhi claimed the second spot with 13 unicorns.

At the same time Mumbai boasts 11 unicorns for the same time period with 3.2x increase in the total number of unicorns in 2021. 

Other cities like Chennai had two unicorns emerge in 2021 and Jaipur joined the list with CarDekho.