India totalled 40 new startup unicorns in the first nine months of 2021, carrying the whole number of startups unicorn in India to 70+. This presents the country with a chance to double the count of Indian unicorns from last year. India had 38 unicorns the previous year, at the end of 2020. In the startup world, a business that is valued at over $1 billion is called a unicorn. These startup unicorns in India have a cumulative revenue of over $15 billion, while they employ around 3.3 lakh people. Out of these, seven unicorns have an employee count of over 10,000 each. In total, these corporations have raised above $51 billion in funding over their existence. Bangalore has the giant unicorns, with one-third of nations unicorns based in the southern city, accompanied by Delhi-NCR with 20 percent.
RELATED: Top Unicorn SaaS Startups in India
India adds 40 unicorns in 2021 so far to take a sum to 70+; over 3.3 lakh people employed: Nasscom
Here we have curated the Top 40 Unicorn Companies List till date. | Last updated on: 26th November 2021
Unicorns of 2021: Top Unicorn Startups in India | 40th Unicorn
Upstox
Mumbai-based Upstox was established in 2009 as RKSV Securities by Shrini Viswanath, Raghu Kumar, Kavitha Subramanian and Ravi Kumar; the organisation entered retail broking in 2011 and rebranded to Upstox in 2016. The business competes with Zerodha, Groww, Paytm Money, Angel Broking, among others.
Spinny
Spinny has become the fourth automobile industry’s startup to turn unicorn from the used car space. Presently, Cars24, CarDekho and Droom had entered the elite club of unicorns.
NoBroker – First PropTech Unicorn
The Bengaluru headquartered startup was established by Saurabh Garg, Akhil Gupta, and Amit Kumar Agarwal in 2013. It will use the funds to develop its product and technology team, go further into existing markets and enter more markets for marketing, and to create NoBroker Hood, its “gated-community” app and marketplace.
Mensa Brands
Ananth Narayanan, the successful digital entrepreneur, founded Mensa in April 2021 to grow the existing online brands that are selling their product and services on e-commerce platforms like Amazon.
Cure.Fit
Health and wellness startup Curefit is the 36th startup to join the unicorn club after raising $50 million funds in cash from food delivery app Zomato. The total deal volume is $100 million. Founded by Mukesh Bansal, Cult.fit has last acquired Tread, a health equipment manufacturing firm. Earlier, it also acquired Onyx, an AI-based Online Health startup founded in California USA.
Good Glamm Group
MyGlamm was established in 2017 by Darpan Sanghvi and Priyanka Gill. The company claims to be India’s fastest-growing D2C beauty brand, with a variety of over 800 cruelty-free and vegan goods across sections such as makeup, skincare, and personal care. It also has over 10,000 offline points of sale in over 70 cities of India. On October 2021, MyGlamm, India’s quickest growing direct-to-consumer beauty brand, has declared the creation of the Good Glamm Group. This move fortifies its position as a ‘Digital House of Brands’ powered by a content-to-commerce strategy.
Acko
About: Founded in November 2016, Acko runs as an independent general insurance company. In a market packed with firms employed in the traditional play, Acko is the first startup in India to build an insurance business solely on a technology platform.
MobiKwik
About: Established in 2009 by husband-wife couple Bipin Preet Singh and Upasana Taku, One MobiKwik Systems Limited was last estimated at $700 million when it raised $20 million last month from Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA).
CarDekho
About: CarDekho, a seller-focused platform for old and new cars, announced on October 13 that it has raised $250 million in an equity and debt funding round, valuing it at $1.2 billion, driving up to a stock market listing by 2022.
Eruditus
About: Edtech startup Eruditus was founded by Ashwin Damera and Chaitanya Kalipatnapu in 2010. The business works with universities like Columbia, Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Cambridge to give students six to nine months-long executive-level courses in over 80 countries.
CoinDCX
About: CoinDCX is a cryptocurrency trade platform formed in 2018 by Sumit Gupta and Neeraj Khandelwal. CoinDCX encourages people to buy and sell crypto coins. Apart from its main exchange victualing to retail investors, CoinDCX also gives trading and lending services for enterprise customers and traders. It further has a global exchanging platform and blockchain community for education.
Grofers
About: A rival to BigBasket and JioMart, Grofers took its plan as an online grocery delivery platform in 2015. Now, founder Albinder Dhindsa heads Grofers after co-founder Saurabh Kumar left the startup beginning this June.
UpGrad
About: Edtech influential Upgrad was co-founded by ex-media lord Ronnie Screwvala, Phalgun Kompalli, Mayank Kumar and Ravijot Chugh by funding just over Rs 170 crore in 2015. The six-year-old UpGrad gives students over 100 courses in data science, machine learning, AI, blockchain, finance, programming, etc.
Zetwerk
About: Established in 2018 by IIT alumni Amrit Acharya, Srinath Ramakkrushnan, Rahul Sharma and Vishal Chaudhary, Zetwerk is a B2B platform that matches clients with contract manufacturers, who will manage everything from prototyping and production to consignments.
MindTickle
About: MindTickle is a Pune and San Francisco based tech startup that gives sales readiness technology. It assists companies to make sales abilities including training, onboarding, operating on each aspect of sales, training and updating it using technology. The startup was established in 2011 by Krishna Depura, Deepak Diwakar, and Nishant Mungali. MindTickle has almost 2000 clients including Snowflake, Johnson & Johnson and Merck.
BharatPe
About: Merchant payments and financial services provider – BharatPe was co-founded by Ashneer Grover and Shashvat Nakrani in 2018. It started India’s first UPI interoperable QR code the same year, the first zero MDR payment receiving service.
OfBusiness
About: Established in 2015 by Asish Mohapatra, Ruchi Kalra, Vasant Sridhar and Bhuvan Gupta, OfBusiness is a B2B dealing platform that helps raw material procurement and credit for SMEs. It also has a lending arm – Oxyzo – that grants up to Rs 2 crore loans to merchants.
Droom
About: Droom was founded back in 2014 by Sandeep Aggarwal, who had co-founded the e-commerce website Shopclues. Droom is a tech and data science-driven online automobile marketplace, which extends an e-commerce stage and technology solutions for purchasing and selling vehicles in India. Droom currently has over 6.5 lakh automobiles listed on its platform and has an 80% market share of vehicle transactions online.
BlackBuck
About: BlackBuck, an online trucking platform, was co-founded in 2015 via Rajesh Yabaji, Chanakya Hridaya, and Rama Subramaniam B. BlackBuck digitises fleet services for the truckers and manages a marketplace to help match trucks with appropriate loads.
BrowserStack
About: BrowserStack is a worldwide player in software trial on the cloud, with 50,000+ consumers and four million+ developer signups. Established in 2011 by entrepreneurs Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal in Mumbai, Browserstack lets developers examine their software, websites or mobile apps across different devices and browsers through the cloud rather than set up their own infrastructure.
Zeta
About: Discovered in 2015 by Bhavin Turakhia and Ramki Gaddipati, banking tech brand Zeta has produced a technology stack that helps it engage with banks, fintech startups, and other online consumer platforms. Banks, which have permits to offer financial assistance to customers, use Zeta’s cloud-based API and SDKs to begin credit cards, debit cards and loans.
Moglix
About: Moglix is a B2B trade platform serving tech-first solutions for the producing sector. This covers procurement, contracting, supply chain financing, logistics, etc. It was formed by Xoogler and IIT Kanpur-ISB alumnus Rahul Garg during 2015. Moglix declares to have a network of over 500,000 SMSEs professions and 3,000 production plants over India, Singapore, the UK, and the UAE.
Urban Company
About: Urban Company is a home assistance provider with a presence over India. Created by Abhiraj Singh Bhal, Varun Khaitan and Raghav Chandra in 2014, the firm approximately has 35,000 professionals contributing at-home services varying from grooming to plumbing. The startup rebranded its name from UrbanClap to a name with a “universal appeal”. It has also extended into international markets such as Australia, Singapore, Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
ChargeBee
About: In 2011, the SaaS startup was co-founded by Krish Subramanian, Saravanan KP, Rajaraman Santhanam and Thiyagarajan T in their residence in Chennai. The platform assists businesses to automate billing, invoices, payments and revenue management across verticals such as SaaS, e-commerce, e-learning and more. It has around 3,000 clients varying from startups to companies in at least 60 nations. The startup declares to have the capability to move large companies to a subscription model within days.
Gupshup
About: Formed by Beerud Sheth in 2004, the conversational messaging platform helps enterprises chat with consumers. Gupshup is accepted by over 39,000 labels across BFSI, retail and e-commerce divisions. The platform powers over 6 billion messages per month worldwide. Besides India, it is present in some of the highest emerging economies from South East Asia to Latin America.
ShareChat
About: Mobile-based social media network ShareChat application and the short-video platform Moj form the bedrock of Mohalla Tech – an app development startup created by Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Pratap Singh & Farid Ahsan in 2015.
Groww
About: Established in 2017, the investment platform is the brainchild of four ex-Flipsters (Flipkart workers) – Lalit Keshre, Harsh Jain, Neeraj Singh and Ishan Bansal. It allows users to digitally invest in stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, IPOs, and gold. The platform claims to have more than 1.5 crores of registered users across 900 cities in India.
PharmEasy
About: Founded via Dharmil Sheth, Dhaval Shah and Mikhil Innani, PharmEasy is one of the biggest e-pharmacies in India alongside 1MG (now owned by the Tata Group) and Netmeds (taken by Reliance Industries). Currently, the six-year-old PharmEasy businesses have about 15 million monthly users, over 80,000 pharmacies and 6,000 plus doctors.
CRED
About: Cred is one of the most recent members of the Unicorn club. Kunal Shah founded this startup in 2018; the credit card bill payments platform rewards its users for clearing their dues on time. Right now, the platform has completed 6 million members whose credit score is above 750. It maintains to host over 35 percent of premium credit cardholders in India.
Meesho
About: Set up by IIT Delhi pass out students Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal in 2015, Meesho is one of the biggest social commerce platforms, which supports small businesses and individuals to sell clothing to accessories on Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook. In 2019, it matured as one of the first Indian startups to bring an investment from Facebook. The firm now has completed 10 million resellers and 70 million shoppers.
Five Star
About: A non-banking investment firm focusing on lending to small businesses in South India, it is one of the oldest members of the unicorn club. Founded in 1984 by VK Ranganathan, the Five Star Business Finance maintains over 1.5 lakh clients and more than Rs 4,000 crore worth of assets under management. It has over 250 offline arms.
Infra.Market
About: Brought by Souvik Sengupta and Aaditya Sharda in 2016, Infra.Market is an online market to buy building material – cement, sand, construction chemicals, fly ash and ready-mix cement. The startup assumes to cross $1 billion in sales by the year-end, with more than two-third of the sales occurring from the brand’s own labels.
Innovaccer
About: Silicon Valley-formed healthcare SaaS company Innovaccer was one of the first startups to meet the coveted billion-dollar valuation club this year. Established in 2014 by Sandeep Gupta, Abhinav Shashank, and Kanav Hasija, Innovaccer streamlines data from health plans, leading care providers, pharmacies, labs, and hospitals.
Digit
About: Owned by industry veteran Kamesh Goyal in 2017, the insurtech platform trade policies below health, motor vehicle & emergency sections. The firm uses technology to clarify processes for customers with tools like smartphone-enabled self-inspection and audio claims.
Apna
About: Apna, an employment platform for blue-collar staffers has been estimated at $1.1 billion (Series C) in just 22 months since it originated, with the investment of $100 million from Tiger Global Management. It is one of the quickest Indian startups to become a unicorn. Established by past Apple executive Nirmit Parikh, Apna- which does not make money still has 16 million users and 1.5 lakh job providers on their platform.
Vedantu
About: Established by Vamsi Krishna, Pulkit Jain, Anand Prakash, and Saurabh Saxena in 2014, Vedantu currently presents live coaching classes for K-12 students, including for entrance exams such as IIT JEE Main and Advanced for engineering and NEET for medical colleges. It also gives lessons for CBSE and ICSE and many state boards, sample question papers, revision notes, mock tests, and past years’ papers.
Licious
About: Licious, which is present in 14 Indian cities, is claimed to have grown 500% in the last year and delivered to more than 2 million unique consumers so far. The six-year-old business has made a farm-to-fork model including managing the entire back-end supply chain. Early last year, it had also forayed into the ready-to-eat division.
CoinSwitch Kuber
About: CoinSwitch co-founders Ashish Singhal, Govind Soni, and Vimal Sagar Tiwari have worked in big firms including Amazon, Microsoft, and Zynga. In 2015-16, being ethical hackers and crypto traders, they found it difficult to get the right crypto platform that provides the best exchange rate. They came up with an idea to develop an online crypto platform that will help its users to provide the best exchange rates of 100+ cryptocurrencies.
Rebel Foods
About: Rebel Foods is the 31st Indian startup to become a unicorn this year as scores of high-profile investors, including Tiger Global, SoftBank, etc. RebelFoods turns the world’s most significant number of what it describes as “internet restaurants” in 10 countries.
