Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: With neo-banking start-up “Open” entering the unicorn club—it is also the 20th unicorn in the financial technology sector alone—India now has 100 unicorns, that is start-ups with a valuation of USD 1 billion (Rs. 7,600 crores) each.
On Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told an audience of Indian origin in Berlin, Germany, that some of these unicorns are poised to become decacorns as well. A decacorn is an entity with a valuation of USD 10 billion.
The first Indian unicorn, mobile advertising platform InMobi, was born in 2011. By 2021, 84 Indian start-ups had entered the unicorn league, half of them last year alone. In the first quarter of the calendar year 2022, their number grew by 13 more to 99 unicorns. The 100th unicorn has come well before the market expectation, the media reported on Tuesday.
Two publicly listed companies — MapMyIndia and EaseMyTrip — also joined the unicorn club. E-commerce giant Flipkart and educational technology major BYJU’s, both privately held start-ups, have a valuation of USD 37.6 billion and USD 21 billion, respectively.
Among the publicly listed companies with a market cap of over USD 1 billion is Nykaa, which currently leads the chart with a valuation of over USD10.6 billion.
Recently, the latest unicorn, Open, raised USD 50 million in a Series D funding round from IIFL with participation from Temasek, Tiger Global, and 3one4 Capital.
The fast pace of funding at high valuations in the last couple of years has completely transformed the start-up landscape. In a record-breaking calendar year 2021, start-ups raised nearly USD 42 billion across 1,580 deals.
According to an Inc42 report in 2019, the market had predicted India would have 100 unicorns by 2025. But mass adoption of digital products during the Covid-19 lockdowns since 2020 changed the ecosystem. The fresh prediction was that India would have 100 unicorns by the end of 2022.
However, the 100th unicorn came in April itself. By 2025, India is likely to have 250 unicorns.
With the pandemic spurring a mass digital revolution in 2020 and 2021, Indian start-ups grew and scaled rapidly, inviting a flood of capital from foreign investors while the domestic investor pool also expanded.
The Government of India is looking at a target of 1,000 unicorns within the next two to three years and predicts many of them might emerge from small towns.
After e-commerce’s 23 unicorns, fin-tech leads the sector with 20 unicorns.
Bengaluru continues to lead the start-up ecosystem. Open is the 39th unicorn born in India’s own ‘Silicon Valley’. Even the first unicorn, InMobi, was born there. The Karnataka capital produced 17 unicorns in 2021 alone.
The Delhi-NCR is a distant second with 29 unicorns, while Mumbai is way behind, with 15 unicorns.