India has a very real potential to be a global powerhouse economy, with a huge population and current economic conditions highlighting consistently strong growth year-on-year. As a result of this growth, Indian startups rapidly find a better business environment to operate in. A key benefit for startups in India is the population factor, coupled with the large number of highly educated Indians, that ensures most startups have the ability to access talented individuals, particularly in IT-related fields. As a result of this and other factors, India is currently seen as the 21st strongest startup ecosystem globally and is expected to rapidly rise up these rankings.
A factor that has improved survivability and success rates for Indian startups is the increasing availability of external funding at all business stages. For instance, concept and early-stage startups can get support from 763 different accelerators and incubators based around India. Additionally, for support with late-stage funding for internationalisation and serious expansion, there are more than 1600 Venture Capital Funds operating in India, with portfolios of over 15,000 companies.
For startups to succeed in a country, the government needs to introduce startup-friendly laws and frameworks. India is attempting to develop these frameworks, with some examples of these being the Startup India initiative, which allows tech startups to register in order to receive tax benefits, better compliance and IPR fast tracking. Furthermore, it also offers a range of grants and mentorship programs to ensure that innovative early-stage startups in India can survive and thrive.
1. Sarvam AI
Year Founded: 2023
HQ: Bengaluru, India
Size: 11-50
Founders: Vivek Raghavan
Sarvam AI is one of India's most exciting AI startups, having been founded in 2023 and rapidly exploding in size in a short time. It is working on a range of solutions that will allow you, as an Indian company, to create, deploy and distribute a range of Generative AI applications. In addition to this, you'll find that your creations are more robust, cheaper to create and actually perform better overall.
As previously mentioned, Sarvam AI has exploded in size in the last year that it has been trading. This growth has to have some level of startup capital behind it to ensure that it is maximised. To this end, it ran a round of startup funding in December 2023 and raised $41 Million to allow for extended talent acquisition and so that Sarvam AI can accelerate its research into Generative AI.
2. Neodocs
Year Founded: 2020
HQ: Mumbai, India
Size: 1-10
Founders: Pratik Lodha, Anurag Meena, Nikunj Malpani
Neodocs is an Indian startup that operates in the medical technology market. It provides you with your own in-home wellness tracker that allows you to easily provide a sample for analysis and then scan the sample card provided, so that you can easily get diagnostic information about your health, without needing to visit a doctor directly. This allows you to track a range of health metrics, including your hydration levels, state of your kidneys and liver and to identify whether you have a UTI.
Neodocs has done incredibly well funding the development of its technology and building a reputable brand reputation as a diagnostics provider. Now, it is targeting to come out of stealth and attack the international markets, along with India. As a result of this, it raised $2 Million in Seed investment during a round in February 2024. This funding will be used to facilitate the international launch of Neodocs, through strategic hiring and marketing costs.
3. Vidyut
Year Founded: 2021
HQ: Bangalore, India
Size: 51-100
Founders: Gursaurabh Singh
Vidyut is an Indian startup that was founded in 2021 and is currently supporting India's EV market. Vidyut makes it easier for you to make the switch to an EV vehicle, by providing affordable finance. Overall, you end up paying up to 40% less than you usually would and you walk away with a new EV on the same day. Better yet, by renting the car, you can make sure that you only end up paying when you drive it and you can also rent the battery for a comparatively low cost.
Vidyut has recently closed off a successful $10 Million Series A Funding round in February 2024. This funding is aimed to introduce new services into Vidyut, such as vehicle resale, insurance provision and maintenance of EVs. The aim is to create a one-stop shop for a customer's EV needs, whilst still allowing people to easily get access to EVs.
4. Krutrim
Year Founded: 2023
HQ: Bangalore, India
Size: 101-250
Founders: Bhavish Aggarwal
Krutrim is another example of an Indian startup, specialised in AI that has burst onto the scene. Founded in 2023, it has already hugely increased its headcount and been classified as India's first AI Unicorn. It is currently developing a LLM AI solution that is being trained in English, along with local Indian languages, meaning that you will be able to use a voice-enabled conversational AI assistant that can understand you and speak to you in a range of local Indian languages.
As previously stated, Krutrim has become India's first AI Unicorn and this happened during its January 2024 funding round, raising $50 Million and placing the valuation of Krutrim over $1 Billion. This funding will be used to accelerate the development and rollout of the Beta version of its assistant, which is currently ongoing.
5. Explurger
Year Founded: 2021
HQ: Delhi, India
Size: 11-50
Founders: Jitin Bhatia
Explurger is an Indian startup that was founded in 2021 and is currently headquartered in Delhi. It is creating a new social media app, tailored to people like you that love to travel. With the assistance of AI, it will log the photos, videos and information about the countries and places that you've visited. Furthermore, you can tailor your upcoming travel experiences by adding items to your bucket list, so you manage to squeeze them in. It can be thought of as the Strava for travelling.
Developing the underlying AI and creating the social media platform itself comes at significant expense and after steadily developing, Explurger is targeting more aggressive growth. This is evidenced by its February 2024 funding round, where it raised $4.5 Million in Series A investment. This funding will be centred around community development for the platform, to improve engagement and increase overall user numbers.
6. Virohan
Year Founded: 2018
HQ: Gurgaon, India
Size: 101-250
Founders: Kunaal Dudeja
Virohan is an incredibly successful startup in India that was founded in 2018 and has experienced strong growth in the years since. It is providing you with the opportunity to gain more accessible and practically useful courses for a range of healthcare courses, such as paramedicine, nursing and more. This provides a more accessible route to work in the medical field, as opposed to the more traditional university-oriented route, opening up opportunities to more people in India.
Virohan has done incredibly well to see significant growth in the past few years. Its most recent funding round is targeted at providing more courses and improving the content quality of existing courses. This pre-Series B round took place in February 2024 and Virohan raised a total of $1.8 Million to facilitate its goals.
7. Scrut Automation
Year Founded: 2021
HQ: Bangalore, India
Size: 51-100
Founders: Aayush Ghosh Choudhury, Gadewar Kaushik, Kush Kaushik
Scrut Automation is an Indian startup that was founded in 2021 and has established itself in the security and compliance market. It provides you with an easy to use SaaS solution that is flexible and built from spreadsheets, allowing your team to actively monitor, log and track existing risks. The automation element allows you to remove repetitive tasks, reducing the risk of a catastrophic human error and decreasing the amount of time these tasks take. This allows you to have complete monitoring effectiveness and tailored GRC for all of your units.
Scrut Automation intends to place specific emphasis on product development at this time along with international expansion, having aimed to increase its user-base by between 30x-40x by the end of 2023. As a result of this, it completed a Series A funding round in February 2024, worth $9 Million. This investment will go a long way to ensuring that it can meet its growth goals.
8. StockGro
Year Founded: 2020
HQ: Bangalore, India
Size: 11-50
Founders: Ajay Lakhotia
StockGro is a startup in India that operates in the FinTech market. It provides you with an easy to use platform that will teach you how to invest in a range of different stocks and asset classes effectively, in order to help you maximise your income. By using StockGro's experts, you can learn about the different types of markets that are ripe for investment, learn how to find the right traders to follow or mirror and test with virtual portfolios whilst consulting with market experts.
StockGro is targeting huge expansion for the coming year and has gone on record saying it requires additional capital to complete this objective. As a result of this, it ran and completed a funding round in January 2024. During this round, it raised a total of $24.7 Million to fuel its aggressive growth strategy.
9. Sprinto
Year Founded: 2020
HQ: Bangalore, India
Size: 101-250
Founders: Girish Redekar
Sprinto is an Indian startup that was founded in 2020 and is currently making its home in Bangalore. It provides you with an automation-driven compliance SaaS platform. This allows you to rapidly develop and tinker with your code and products, whilst having automatic reviews of any changes to ensure that you can act with agility, without compliance bogging you down. You can achieve integration across any platform that you need to, such as AWS, GSuite, GitHub and more.
Sprinto has not sought any external startup funding since its $10 Million Series A in February 2022. The funding at the time was used to further develop its products and intensify its growth, allowing it to significantly expand its headcount in the previous two years. In the event that Sprinto aims to further expand internationally, it is very likely that another investment round will take place.
10. Wishlink
Year Founded: 2022
HQ: Gurgaon, India
Size: 11-50
Founders: Shaurya Gupta, Divyansh Ameta, Chandan Yadav
Wishlink is an Indian startup that provides an incredibly easy way for influencers to market to their fans on behalf of brands, through the use of bespoke link-sharing capabilities. Fans that buy items from these links are then directly tagged back to the influencer, so they can receive what they are owed. As a result of this, you can easily run influencer marketing campaigns for your fans and reap huge benefits incredibly easily, with links that can be easily integrated with social media profiles.
Wishlink has recently outlined its growth plan for 2024, which has been fueled by its most recent investment round, taking place in February 2024. This Series A netted Wishlink $7 Million and it intends to use it so that it can onboard more than 1,000 brands and create collaboration deals with more than 15,000 influencers over the course of the next year.
11. Zolve
Year Founded: 2020
HQ: Bangalore, India
Size: 51-100
Founders: Raghunandan G
Zolve is a FinTech startup in India that was founded in 2020 and is making it easier for you to get access to an American bank account and credit cards, along with a range of other essential items such as insurance, student loans and car finance. You can even get help with your VISA, the aim is for Zolve to make it easier for you as a legal immigrant to get access to all of the financial resources that you need to survive and thrive in the United States.
Zolve's most recent round of startup funding took place in October 2023, when it raised $100 Million. This funding has been earmarked for further product development, particularly with regards to the credit products it can provide immigrants, and further user acquisition in a year where Zolve has supported more than 500,000 people.
12. eFeed
Year Founded: 2021
HQ: Pune, India
Size: 11-50
Founders: Kumar Ranjan, Ravi Chauhan and Ankit Patel
eFeed is an Indian startup that was founded in 2021 and is currently operating from Pune. By utilising the power of artificial intelligence, it is able to collect and analyse data about your animals, providing you with critical insights and feed for your animals based on their needs. For you, this ensures that you maximise your yield from each animal, whilst also minimising your greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, all of the feed provided by eFeed comes from sustainable sources.
eFeed has experienced great success since being founded, however, its management team have ambitions to scale the operational side of eFeed, creating more revenue opportunities and also allowing for the brand name to be widely recognised. To this end, it completed a funding round in January 2024, worth $1.5 Million. As stated, these funds will be used to grow operational capability, eliminating bottlenecks.
13. Segwise
Year Founded: 2023
HQ: Bengaluru, India
Size: 1-10
Founders: Brijesh Bharadwaj, Shobhit Gupta
Segwise is an Indian startup that was founded in 2023 and operates in the product development market. Your product development team needs to be armed with all of the key information they need in order to tweak things to maximise your conversion, and identify potential points for development that haven't been considered. Segwise' software platform provides this, with its AI-driven platform allowing you to get access to the growth metrics of each of your procuts, giving you key insights into what is and isn't working.
Segwise has recently identified that in order to meet its business goals of creating AI agents to assist product and growth teams, it will require significantly more capital. As a result of this, in February 2024 it took part in a Pre-Seed funding round. This investment will go directly into product development, with the aim of then having explosive growth once the product becomes more mature. This round netted Segwise $1.6 Million.
14. Varaha
Year Founded: 2022
HQ: Delhi, India
Size: 51-100
Founders: Madhur Jain, Ankita Garg, and Vishal Kuchanur
Varaha is an Indian startup that was founded in 2022 and is currently headquartered in Delhi. It provides a solution for climate change reversal, with an emphasis on growing economies. Varaha is enroute to sequestering more than one Billion tonnes of Co2 from the atmosphere by 2030. Your business can benefit by acquiring high value carbon credits, in addition to getting high-level support with a range of carbon removal projects.
Varaha has seen great recent success in securing startup funding, with its most recent funding round in February 2024 securing $8.7 Million in investment. It has been stated that this investment will be used to improve its platform and allow it to conduct large-scale outreach to new customers.
15. Supertails
Year Founded: 2021
HQ: Bangalore, India
Size: 101-250
Founders: Varun Sadana, Aman Tekriwal, Vineet Khanna
Supertails is an Indian startup that was founded in 2021 and operates in the Pet Care market. By offering the most comprehensive online pet store in India. Using Supertails, you can buy a range of different healthy foods, toys and essential items to ensure your pet has everything they need to live a fulfilled and healthy life. It is the premier online pet store covering the entirety of India.
Building the underlying infrastructure for the e-commerce solution across India, in addition to building a well-known brand has required a lot of capital. In order to secure its continued growth, Supertails has supplemented its revenue with startup funding worth $15 Million in February 2024.
16. SuperOps.ai
Year Founded: 2020
HQ: Chennai, India
Size: 51-100
Founders: Parthiban Karumbasalam, Jayakumar Karumbasalam
Superops.AI is an Indian startup that was founded in 2020 and it helps Managed Service Providers by providing a reliable and essential service for tools and services to manage your business. Its artificial intelligence enabled platform allows you to manage every aspect of your operations from IT support ticket management, contract and quote management tools, automation, network monitoring and alerting and more.
Early-stage funding and Superops.ai's own revenue has allowed it to undergo exceptional growth since 2020, however the founders have identified additional growth opportunities that require additional investment to achieve. As a result of this, it completed a February 2024 funding round where it raised $12.4 Million to achieve these goals.
17. Minimalist
Year Founded: 2020
HQ: Jaipur, India
Size: 11-50
Founders: Chirag Gander, Sahil Vaidya
Minimalist is an Indian startup that is revolutionizing the skincare and beauty markets. It only offers the highest quality health and beauty products, ensuring that whatever you're putting on your skin is actually good for your skin and will get you the results you want. On top of this, it also makes sure that its prices are affordable for the average customer. This ensures that most people can access their brilliant products and start looking their best.
In order to ramp up product production and ensure it could provide a full suite of health and beauty products to its customer, Minimalist raised $14.8 Million in July 2021, not long after launching. This round has ensured that it could rapidly expand in its initial stages and it likely won't be long before Minimalist seeks to expand further.
18. FlexifyMe
Year Founded: 2021
HQ: Pune, India
Size: 51-100
Founders: Amit Bhayani
FlexifyMe is an Indian startup that is already well-known by the public in India, due to its previous appearance on Shark Tank India. It provides you with the best way to improve your flexibility and joint health through the offering of online yoga classes, coupled with support for pain in a number of common debilitating areas, such as neck, back, shoulder and knee pain. It is backed by a range of medical professionals, specialising in orthopaedics and physiotherapy.
FlexifyMe's valuation has increased massively recently, off of the back of previous funding and investment it secured on Shark Tank India in March 2023, securing a further $120,000 and great publicity for its services. The funding, combined with this recent publicity will allow FlexifyMe to accelerate user acquisition and target more aggressive growth in the near future.
19. Velocity
Year Founded: 2020
HQ: Bengaluru, India
Size: 101-250
Founders: Abhiroop Medhekar
Velocity is a FinTech startup in India that was founded in 2020 and has gone from strength to strength in that time. It allows you to effectively manage all of the financial aspects of your business. For example, you can secure up to 4 crore in as little as four days for your business, using a singular credit card for all of your business credit card payments. In addition to this, you also get a powerful analytics platform for your e-commerce site, giving you actionable insights into how your products are performing.
Velocity has required a large amount of up front capital in order to facilitate its finance arm, giving other businesses a lifeline in funding support. As a result of this and to focus on building more products to provide to its customers, Velocity most recently raised startup funding totalling $10.3 Million in March 2023.
20. Koparo Clean
Year Founded: 2020
HQ: Delhi, India
Size: 1-10
Founders: Simran Khara
Koparo Clean is another Indian startup that has received a lot of attention after appearing on Shark Tank India. It is providing you with a safer and more environmentally-friendly alternative to the common home cleaners, many of which contain toxic chemicals such as bleach. It also aims to recycle as much as possible during the production process, ensuring that your environmental footprint is minimised.
A lot of Koparo Clean's initial expenses were centred around customer acquisition and the development of its non-toxic cleaners. Koparo Clean is now targeting more aggressive expansion, allowing for greater revenue potential. To quickly stimulate this growth, it took part in a funding round in February 2024, gaining investment of $710,000.
21. Perfora
Year Founded: 2021
HQ: Gurgaon, India
Size: 1-10
Founders: Jatan Bawa, Tushar Khurana
Perfora is an Indian startup that was founded in 2021 and is currently headquartered in Gurgaon. It is creating a one-stop shop for anything related to dental health. You can get a range of high value toothpastes, toothbrushes including electric and teeth whitening kits, so you can show off your smile. You can take back control of your dental health, without breaking the bank.
Perfora has spent the previous three years developing its oral care products and growing its brand reputation in India. Now, it has objectives to rapidly expand its market share and grow its revenue. It has previously raised $3.7 Million to facilitate this expansion and in February 2024 it raised further funding, although the exact amount was undisclosed.
FAQs
What Are The Strongest Startup Industries In India?
The strongest startup industries in India are FinTech, eCommerce and Enterprise Software.
What Is The Average Investment In The Startup Industry In India
Indian startups raised around $10 Billion in 2023, and between 25,000 startups this means the average Indian startup raised around $400,000 during the year.
How Many Startups Are There In India?
It is currently estimated that there are between around 25,000 tech startups in India.
