Orios Venture Partners announced the release of its The Indian Tech Unicorn Report 2021. The year 2021 has been marked as a year of unicorns; with 46 new unicorns, the number now has doubled upto 90. It has also been a landmark year for tech IPOs with a total of 11 Indian startups (including 8 unicorns) having raised $7.16 billion through public offerings. One97 Communication (PayTM) has raised India’s largest ever IPO with an issue size of USD 2.46Bn. Further, Zomato has the highest market capitalisation at USD14.8Bn, among the listed Indian startups, followed by Nykaa at USD 13.5Bn & Freshworks at USD 6.9Bn.
The report highlights India’s ascent to the 3rd largest startup ecosystem, with its +60,000 startups creating one out of every three unicorns globally. While Fintech, Ecommerce and SaaS have seen the maximum number of unicorns, health-tech, edutech, D2C, Gaming and Crypto are also close behind.
Commenting on the report, Rehan Yar Khan, Managing Partner, Orios Venture Partners said “Despite witnessing an economic downturn in the first half, it has been an exciting and tremendously promising year for tech startups. In terms of measuring scale for the ecosystem, our report is a clear validation of the value creation that has been achieved through innovation in technology, both in terms of IPO and unicorns. ”
Some more key findings of the report are:-
As per the report, 18 of the unicorns are from the startup capital of Bengaluru, closely followed by Delhi at 13.Mumbai saw a 3.2x increase in the total number of unicorns and Jaipur joined the unicorn city list in 2021 with CarDekho
It has taken an average of 7.8 years to make a unicorn in 2021. This average is down from 9.9 years which was the case in 2020. Cumulatively, India has turned 33 unicorns in less than 5 years. The trend that is noticeable here is that time has been reducing, as founders with prior founding or startup experience are coming into play
Raising its seed round in 2008, Walmart-owned Flipkart is the most valued start-up in India. Flipkart became a unicorn in 2012 and a decacorn in January 2018. It was valued at $37.6 Bn after raising $3.6 bn in July 2021
India has seen four decacorns so far- Paytm, Flipkart, Byju’s, OYO Rooms
Mensa Brand that became the fastest unicorn as it took only 6 months to turn unicorn in Nov’21 round after raising the first Valuation of $50Mn round in May 2021
20% unicorn founders are non-engineers. 2/3rd of the Indian Unicorns have at least one or more founders from IITs, IIMs or ISB; 105 IIT graduates are unicorn founders
The report also highlights that there are 13 female unicorn founders, 8 out which have emerged in the year 2021; Falguni Nayar – Founder & CEO of Nykaa, Gazal Kalra – Founder of Rivigo, Ruchi Kalra- Founder of OfBusiness, Divya Gokulnath – Founder of Byju’s, Ghazal Alagh – Founder of MamaEarth and Saritha Katikaneni – Founder of Zenoti to name a few
