Indian founders account for $560 billion of company value abroad

Founders who grew up in India account for $560 billion of founder-share-attributed value across 205 current and former unicorns abroad, Prosus and Dealroom find

Founders who grew up in India account for $560 billion of founder-share-attributed company value in current and former unicorns abroad, according to the new Indian Diaspora Index from Prosus and Dealroom.

 

The report demonstrates the value created by founders from India who went on to build businesses across global markets.

 

Tracking 205 overseas unicorns with at least one founder who grew up in India, the index finds that 70 unicorns totalling $243 billion in value were built by all-Indian founders.

 

They include Jay Chaudhry (Zscaler), Arvind Jain, Arvind Nithrakashyap, Bipul Sinha and Soham Mazumdar (Rubrik), Ajeet Singh, Dheeraj Pandey and Mohit Aron (Nutanix), and Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta (Skild). 

 

 

Another 135 unicorns with Indian-origin founders in the core team, such as Palo Alto, Bloom Energy, Astera Labs and Perplexity, contributed $317 billion on the founder-share basis.

 

Together, these companies account for around $560 billion on a founder-share basis.

 

In contrast, 102 unicorns based in India account for nearly $349 billion on a founder-share basis, led by Flipkart ($36 billion), Zomato ($30 billion), and Groww ($16 billion).

 

“The Indian Diaspora Index measures something we have seen and experienced first-hand in India: Exceptional talent density with the ambition to build at enormous scale, often by solving some of the country’s most complex and consequential problems,” said Saurav Jain, principal investor, Prosus India.

 

“Indian founders have the ability to turn technology, ingenuity and deep local insight into businesses that can fundamentally change how people live and work. That is what has kept us investing in the country for nearly two decades. What has changed in this period is that founders no longer have to leave to build at scale. The market, the capital and the operating talent are now here.”

 

A striking finding is the geographic concentration of this success. The separate, broader birth-origin analysis shows that 62 per cent of its companies are based in the United States, making it the dominant ecosystem for Indian-origin founders building high-value companies. In total, 200 of the 323 companies in this broader cohort were either started (178) or relocated (22) to the United States. This birth-origin analysis includes founders who left India as children and companies based in India; it is separate from the narrower overseas index of founders who grew up in India. 

 

“The footprint of India’s entrepreneurial talent extends well beyond the country’s borders,” said Jain. “The index offers an important perspective on how Indian-origin founders are contributing to value creation across global markets, with the US emerging as a particularly significant ecosystem for this activity.”

 

The findings point to the increasingly global nature of India’s entrepreneurial footprint, extending the country’s influence far beyond its domestic startup landscape. About 91 per cent (187 of 205) of overseas unicorns in the Indian Diaspora Index are based in the US.