13 start-up promoters join Rs 10-bn-plus club, membership triples

Oyo founder Ritesh Agarwal, Ola's Bhavish Agarwal, and co-founders of Udaan are some of the newest entrants to Barclays Hurun India Rich list

The number of startup founders in the country whose net worth has topped Rs 10 billion each, has more than tripled to 19, according to the Barclays Hurun India Rich List for 2018. In 2017, there were only six startup entrepreneurs who were part of this elite club.

The combined wealth of these promoters, most of whose start-ups are Unicorns, has doubled from Rs 348 billion in 2017 to Rs 736 billion this year.

Entrepreneurs who made it to the list include Oyo’s Ritesh Agarwal with a net worth of Rs 26 billion, Ola co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal (Rs 39 million) and the co-founders of Udaan, the one latest to join India’s Unicorn club -- Sujeet Kumar, Amod Malviya and Vaibhav Gupta (Rs 11 billion each).

BYJU’s was the fastest growing Unicorn this year with the net worth of its CEO Byju Raveendran standing at Rs 33 billion, said the report. The edut-ech platform is believed to have crossed $2 billion in valuation based on its latest round of funding raised from private equity major General Atlantic. Byju’s brother Riju Ravindran, also a director in the company, too made it to the list with a net worth of Rs 16 billion.

Barclays Hurun India Rich List compiles the richest individuals in India having a net worth of Rs 10 billion or more. This year 831 such people made it to the list. According to Anas Rahman, MD and Chief Researcher, Hurun Report India, this number could surge past 1,200 next year.

“While Indian business families are growing in terms of size and wealth, the process of wealth creation has become far more democratised. As a result, we are seeing more and more young entrepreneurs being added to the list,” said Satya Narayan Bansal, CEO, Barclays Private Clients India.

Bansal also said wealth creation was earlier mostly restricted to sectors like manufacturing or pharmaceutical. But with the coming of new-age entrepreneurs, the pool of wealth creation has far more diversified.

Software and services, an industry to which all the 19 new-age entrepreneurs belong to, was number four in terms of wealth creation when the Hurun India report came into being in 2012. This sector has jumped to number two on the list creating most of the wealth in India after pharma, said Rahman of Hurun India report.