India will have over 250 unicorns by 2025, says Iron Pillar report

India will have more than 250 Unicorns by 2025. This prediction comes from the proprietary data analysis of venture growth investor, Iron Pillar, in its Tech Unicorns Market Landscape Report IV. InMobi was India’s first unicorn in 2011. Since then, 129 startups have joined this star status, of which 100 were added from January 2019, generating a total value of $535 billion. 

Entrepreneurs are building bigger enterprises at a faster rate -- 50 per cent of the 130 companies reached unicorn status in the first five years after their initial institutional fundraising. The public listing of 12 Unicorns is another indicator of the increasing maturity of the Indian tech ecosystem. 

“The total number of unicorns built from India more than doubled from 62 to 130 in last 15 months," said Anand Prasanna, Managing Partner of Iron Pillar. "While we believe that this pace may reduce a bit in the next 24 months, creating 250 companies with over $1 billion in value by 2025 is an extremely activable goal for Indian founders. We are especially bullish since about 50 per cent of these scaled companies are building for markets beyond India as well.”

Unicorns built in India included 58 global cloud companies, 59 B2C ( business to consumer) companies, and 13 B2B ( business to business) companies. An increasing number of Indian tech founders building for global markets from India are choosing to base their headquarters in the US. Companies building cloud products for the world from India are extremely capital efficient, reaching the unicorn status with 42 per cent less capital compared to B2C companies. They also outperform on value created per unit of capital raised and the number of exits. The average number of fundraising rounds by global cloud unicorns is fewer than B2C and B2B unicorns.

According to CB Insights March 2022 report on the share of unicorns, India emerged as the third-largest tech market in the world after US and China. Indian tech startups notched $42 billion funding in 2021 alone.