The vibrant and growing startup ecosystem of India has shaken the bottle of innovation across all sectors of the Indian economy. It has written India’s flourishing growth story with the golden ink of the Unicorn’s success. The outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic has presented numerous opportunities for innovation and thus India’s startup landscape has seen the rise of 44 unicorns in 2021 itself with a cumulative valuation of US$ 93 billion. This success curve is expected to touch the mark of 250 unicorns by 2025 as per the “Tech Unicorns Market Landscape Report IV”.

The rising unicorns are capable to provide solutions to the problems faced by society, financial systems, the environment, etc. During the pandemic, when the world was at a standstill and commercial activities were at rest, it provided individuals time to think out of the box and pursue their dreams of being an entrepreneur by testing the ideas directly in the market.

This translated into the large registration of startups and sharp growth of unicorns like Paytm, UpGrad, Zomato, etc. According to the Economic Survey 2022, 83 startups have joined India’s unicorn club to date with an aggregate valuation of US$ 277.77 billion and are mostly operational in the service sector, which has around 50% contribution to the total GDP of India.  

The rising number of India’s population and their increasing income levels has provided unseen opportunities for innovation through these unicorns. Due to the increase in smartphone users in India, these unicorns are capable to touch the numerous chords of everybody’s life through their innovative online solutions. The overgrowing use of digital payments, the rising demand for online education, and e-commerce have helped entrepreneurial minds to succeed and contribute to the growth of online business models in the country.

This development has further resulted in their entry into India’s stock markets through IPO and opened the investment options for retail, High Net worth Individuals, and institutional investors to book handsome gains. The unicorns have seen opportunity in disguise and scaled the country’s innovation landscape beyond the borders and attracted several investors and angel networks to pour their money to escalate the growth of their brainchild and nurture the ideas for India’s economic prosperity in the long run.