Over 25% unicorns in India founded by serial entrepreneurs: Report

This expertise is what helped India become the third nation to have 100 unicorns, including the 24 unicorns that emerged in 2022, according to the report.

Today, one unicorn out of every 13 globally is being born in India.

“India remains a global hotspot in technology company value creation with 22 unicorns last year. The next phase of the Indian technology story will be graduating these unicorns to exits via initial public offerings (IPOs) and the coming years should see a flurry of activity in that direction,” said Rehan Yar Khan, managing partner, Orios Venture Partners.

Startups raised $25 billion in 2022, or almost 2.2 times of what they did in 2020. However, in 2022, startups also witnessed a 30% decline in funding compared with 2021.

The number of startups going for stock market listing declined to 4 in 2022 compared with 11 in 2021. Owing to the funding winter, the technology ecosystem in India saw relatively less activity last year.

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Software-as-a-service (SaaS) dethroned fintech to become the sector with the largest number of unicorns in 2022. It had the six unicorns, followed by fintech (four), logistics (three) and edtech (two).

“What I would certainly do is, I would check the top lines of these companies,” Khan had told ET. “I think what surprised me was that these companies are not very large and then suddenly they were all unicorns.”

Bengaluru remained the largest unicorn hub in India and also emerged as the 7th largest unicorn hub of the world, the report mentioned.

Swiggy was added to the Decacorn list (with a valuation of $10 billion and above) last year, making the count five so far.

(Graphics and illustrations by Rahul Awasthi)