Orios Venture Partners is one of India’s leading early-stage venture capital funds.
It is celebrating 10 years of those startups who have reached the milestone of becoming unicorns by contributing significantly to the Indian economy.
The 44 have created over 1.4 million jobs annually (through direct and indirect employment) and cumulatively created around $106 billion for the Indian startup ecosystem.
MakeMyTrip, InMobi, Paytm, Byjus, Cars24, Ola and others are among the successful 44 ‘Unicorns of India’.
Fintech startups dominated these 44 Unicorns, followed by retails and SaaS players. Other segments include logistics, data analytics, travel, food and gaming.
41% of unicorns are from Bengaluru, followed by Delhi at 34% and Mumbai at 14%.
“Our report shows that the Indian startup ecosystem has generated tremendous value for founders, employees, investors and the economy. Most of these are technology backed, which is the key differentiating factor between unicorns of the 21st century vs the prior era,” said Rehan Yar Khan, Managing Partner, Orios Venture Partners.
“We are proud to be associated with 3 unicorns – Ola, Druva, Pharmeasy since their early days and look forward to being part of another 3-5 unicorns over the next few years,” added Khan.
The report also delves into the average time period that a company has taken to become a unicorn which is an average of eight 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.
Startups like Naukri.com and MakeMyTrip are from the pre-2005 era and it took 14 plus years to achieve the Uniocorn status.
While Zomato, Flipkart and Policy Bazaar (2007-2009) have taken almost 8.7 years. Nykaa and OYO (2012-13) have taken even less time at 5.8 years with Udaan and OLA Electric (2016-17) taking only three years to achieve that status.
Another interesting finding is that 86% of unicorn founders are engineers with the maximum of them belonging to the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology).
By: Pankaj Maru
This article first appeared in the TechHerald and is republished with permission