A Brief Analysis of India’s 66 Indian Unicorns

Well, its needless to say how Indian start-up ecosystem is growing and getting stronger with time. This year just confirms the same. Till 2020 we had 38 unicorns in the ecosystem and in just 9 month of 2021 we have added 28 unicorns. If we continue to add start-ups in this way, then we might end this year by doubling our unicorn numbers over that of 2020.

But this unicorns ecosystem system which is getting created has a lot to say about many changing trends. There statistics speak a lot about Indian start-up era and how it has grown so rapidly in last few years. Let’s put some light on the same:

1. Revenue: Together 66 unicorns are generating over USD 15 billion revenue with ~42% unicorns generating over $100 million in revenue

2. Year of Inception: 75% unicorns are incorporated in last 11 years (2010 and onwards) out of which more than 50% are incorporated in 3 years (2010 – 8, 2011 – 9 and 2015 – 10)  

3. Employee: Unicorns in India have employee strength of over 3.3 lakh, 7 unicorns have employee count of over 10,000 each.

4. Cumulative Funding: 66 unicorns together raised over USD 51 billion in cumulative funding over their lifetime, 18% of them have raised over USD 1 billion each.

5. Round of Funding: Unicorns in India have gone through over 500 funding rounds till date.

6. Vertical: Ecommerce, SaaS and Fintech account for more 60% of total unicorns followed by Edtech and Logistics. Even 60% of the total cumulative funding also went to these 3 sectors.

7. B2B / B2C: B2B wins this race and accounts for 50% of unicorns while only 24% unicorns are purely B2B. 16% serves both B2B and B2C.    

8. Location: More than 1/3^rd of unicorns are headquartered in Bengaluru while more than 20% are headquartered in Delhi NCR.

9. Time to Unicorns: ~90% of the start-ups turned unicorns in 10 or less number of years from their year of incorporation out of which 70% turned unicorns in less than 5 years.

10. Decacorns: India has currently 3 decacorns (valuation over USD 10 billion), Byju’s, Paytm and Flipkart

The above analysis might sound some number crunching but the story behind speaks out load that Indian start-up ecosystem not only getting stronger, but it is also getting more stable and resilient towards global macro-economic factors. List of all 66 unicorns in India: