Reliance Retail 7th among top 100 VC-backed private firms globally: Study

Reliance Retail ranks 7th globally among private firms, as India places three companies in the top 100 dominated by AI giants

Reliance Retail has been ranked seventh among the top 100 most valuable privately held, venture capital (VC)-backed companies in the world with a post-money valuation of over $100 billion, according to research by Venture Capital Initiative of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. 

The research is based on data up to January 2026. 

Apart from Reliance Retail, two more companies from India are on the list of top 100 — NSE India, which is 27th in the pecking order, with a post-money valuation of $24 billion, and Tata EV Mobility, 93rd on the list, with a valuation of $9 billion. 

The Mukesh Ambani-owned company, which is one of the seven hectacrons (valuation over $100 billion) on the list, is backed by numerous big global private equity players, including Qatar Investment Authority, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, KKR, Silverlake, GIC, TPG, and Mubadala. 

Though Reliance Retail is the only company in the retail space which is in the top seven, its valuation is far behind AI giants like OpenAI (post-money valuation of $852 billion), Elon Musk’s SpaceX ($400 billion), Anthropic ($350 billion), Bytedance ($300 billion), Databricks ($134 billion), and xAI ($113 billion). 

The Venture Capital Initiative study has looked through data of over 1,700 privately held unicorns across the world with a combined post-money valuation of $7.3 trillion. The 100 most valuable companies alone are worth $3.7 trillion, more than half of all unicorn value.  

The top three players — ChatGPT, SpaceX, and Anthropic — account for a third of that amount. And, two out of the three most-valuable companies are AI players. 

While the US is a clear leader with as many as 65 of the top 100 companies, it is followed by China (21), India (3), the UK (3), and Germany (2). 

What is interesting is that the collective post-money valuation of the three Indian companies is pegged at $133 billion, which is nearly a fifth of the collective valuation of 21 Chinese companies, at $634 billion. 

NSE India, the Indian stock exchange company, is also a key player to watch. It has a valuation higher than US-based video game and software developer Epic Games ($23 billion), and also more than AI company Perplexity in the US ($20 billion).  Perplexity has an Indian-origin cofounder, Aravind Srinivas. 

On the other hand, Tata EV Mobility, which manufactures electric vehicles (EVs), has similar or near-similar valuation as that of US-based neurotech company Neuralink ($10 billion), which was founded by Elon Musk with eight other scientists and engineers. Further, its valuation is same as that of HKC Corporation ($9 billion), a Chinese innovator in semiconductor displays.