With two months left in 2019, Indian tech startups are already having a great year as a record amount of $11.3B has flown into the local ecosystem of the country, as reported by TechCrunch.
This is the first time that Indian startups have raised the largest sum in one year, paving the country’s way towards steady growth.
The tech startups in the country are showing significant growth year by year. As per Tracxn, local startups accumulated $7.9 billion, $4.3 billion, $10.4 billion in 2015, 2016, and 2017, respectively.
Startups offering consumers services or products such as Fintech have got the highest share of venture capital in 2019 i.e., around $8.2 billion. Similarly, the retail startups raised around $2.3 billion, and enterprises based startups bagged about $1.5 billion, respectively.
While interview Dev Khare, a partner at VC fund Lightspeed Venture Partners said that in 2014 and 2015, Indian startups were solely focused on e-commerce solutions and were replicating the ideas of the west. However, now, the trend has changed much. Startups have started working in multiple domains and coming up with innovative ideas.
“But today, they are tackling a wide range of categories and opportunities and building some solutions that have not been attempted in any other market.”
He further stated that telecom operator Reliance Jio and government efforts like the GST taxation system for businesses and the introduction of UPI payments infrastructure had played a vital role in this regard.
Jio is providing low-cost mobile data to the Indian community. The graph of Indian online users has gone exponentially high because of this service like never before.
Mr. Khere sheds light on Lightspeed’s internal research telling that the percentage of people who are willing to work at startup has increased dramatically within a few years. He said, in 2010, the majority of the founders of startups that had reached a Series A financing round had not worked at a startup before. The ratio was around only 10%. The figure became high in 2014 i.e., 36%, and it is mind-blowing that it reached up to 70% in 2018.
The ratio of a women-led startup is also increasing. Last year it was around 10%, but now it has gone up to 17.3%.
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While an interview with TechCrunch, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CEO, and founder of Paytm, said that in initial days, it was extremely difficult for him even to raise funding of a few thousand dollars for his startup.
Now, the chances are Zomato, Swiggy, and Paytm alone will raise $3 billion in the coming months. It is fascinating to see how the small startup ecosystem in India has flourished stupendously in 10 years.
Featured image: PayTm
