India is on track to overtake China as the world’s fastest-growing major economy next year, according to World Bank projections.
So far 33 startups have joined the unicorn club this year — 5 in just the last two weeks. Compare that to 40 Indian unicorns minted in total from 2011-2020. Over $23.5 billion in funding has been collected from Indian startups so far this year, which is nearly double the last two years, per PitchBook data. Analysts credit regulatory reforms that make it easier to do business, rising incomes and consumption, and new habit formation emerging post-pandemic.
It’s a huge bounceback after the Indian economy had contracted 7.3% in 2020. Now it's a much better time and place to be in starting a company. Makers are all-in:
“In 2020, I left the USA for India to build products for the Global Indian Diaspora,” Prateek Swain wrote as he launched last month — his startup Swadesh Capital is a platform for comparing real estate products for investment in Indian real estate.
Here are six more recent and noteworthy VC-backed Indian launches.
👸 Leap.club is a community-led, professional network for women that launched last month. It just raised $810K in seed funding.
✏️Peppertype.ai is a GPT-3-powered content generator. It's got $4.2M in the bag from a Series A earlier this year.
💸 Razorpay became a unicorn last year and recently added Salesforce to its cap table as a “strategic investor.” It launched its Payroll Slack tool in August.
🤝Mint was launched by Cred, which is the youngest Indian startup to be valued at $2 billion+ at two years old. Mint enables CRED users to lend to one another at an interest rate of up to 9% annually.
💼 Relevel is a hiring platform from Unacadmeny, the Edtech startup that just raised $440M. Job-seekers can showcase skills through tests and apply to multiple companies with one score.
₿CoinDCX became India’s first crypto unicorn last month. The makers launched the second iteration of the exchange and global cryptocurrency aggregator a year ago.
And for fun, we’re also highlighting today’s launch of Ramayana Capital.
“Today is the auspicious Hindu festival of Dussehra. It signifies the victory of good over evil. To commemorate, we're launching a fun little game we made,” Swain of Swadesh Capital (mentioned earlier) wrote.
Luna Display turns your iPad into a wireless display.
“But didn't Apple make this possible when they launched Sidecar?” you ask. Right.
“That day we put a stake in the ground and said we aren't going anywhere. ⚡ Now 2.5 years later, I'm proud to announce that we've reinvented ourselves as a cross-platform company!” wrote maker Matt Ronge.
We’re here for it.
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Another day, another innovative application of NFT tech. Today’s CharmVerse launch combines NFTs with IOUs.
Customizable NFTs called charms can be collected by one person to serve as an IOU from another. The makers have partnered with business heroes (from tech to relationship experts) to create the first collection of Charms which can be used to issue IOUs on anything from an investor intro to a sponsored tweet to date coaching.