At a time when India’s startup ecosystem is navigating slower funding, shutdowns, and a fragile global economy, optimism is in short supply. Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath, however, believes this uncertainty is India’s perfect opportunity. In a LinkedIn post marking National Startup Day, Kamath acknowledged the prevailing pessimism but cautioned against letting it define the country’s future. “If we aren’t hopeful that India will do better,” he wrote, “then everything becomes moot.”
Acknowledging the problems
Kamath did not shy away from India’s structural challenges. “This isn’t to say we don’t have real problems. We do,” he said, adding that such difficulties are not unique to India. Every country that has succeeded economically, he argued, has had to navigate its own set of obstacles.
“What matters is how we respond,” he wrote, framing the current moment less as a verdict on India’s trajectory and more as a test of its adaptability.
Rather than dwelling on what India could or should have achieved, Kamath suggested a more pragmatic lens. “It’s better to think about things as they are, rather than as they should be, and then work toward what they could be,” he said.
A transformed startup ecosystem
Kamath contrasted today’s startup landscape with that of a decade ago. In 2015–16, he recalled, India’s startup ecosystem was narrow and fragile, dominated by a few large e-commerce companies. “There were no local pools of capital. No recognition,” he wrote. Startups, in his words, were often viewed as something people pursued “if you had no other skills in life.” That perception, Kamath argued, has fundamentally changed.
India now has deeper domestic capital pools, including long-term investors, a large and growing home market, improving ease of doing business, and visible government backing for entrepreneurship. Together, these factors have reshaped the economics of building a company in the country.
Global shifts, local opportunity
Kamath also placed India’s moment in a broader global context. The world, he said, is undergoing a rare realignment, geopolitically, economically, and technologically. “The world order is being redrawn,” he wrote.
As countries focus increasingly on self-sufficiency and the era of unfettered globalisation recedes, Kamath suggested India is unusually well-positioned. “For India, this means we have all the enabling factors in place,” he said, pointing to capital availability, policy support, and domestic scale.
One of the most important shifts, according to Kamath, is technological. Advances in artificial intelligence have sharply reduced the cost of experimentation. “You can now build and test ideas that would have required entire teams and massive budgets just a few years ago,” he added.
AI lowers the cost of risk
“There’s never been a better time,” he said. Kamath closed his post with a clear message to aspiring entrepreneurs. Despite uncertainty, and perhaps because of it, he believes the present moment offers an unusually strong opportunity.
“Given all of these converging factors,” he wrote, “there’s never been a better time to take your shot.”
Startups and their reality
That being said, a reality check at the startup community in India shows that 724 startups shut down in 2025 (till October), down sharply from 3,903 closures in 2024, as per data shared by Tracxn with financialexpress.com. Furthermore, according to Tracxn’s report, startups in the country raised $10.5 billion in 2025, making the country rank third after the US and the UK in the startup ecosystem.
As per data from PIB, India has over 2 lakh DPIIT-recognised startups as of December 2025. Around 50% of recognised startups now originate from Tier-II and Tier-III cities.
PIB data also revealed that women-led participation has also deepened, with more than 45% of recognised startups having at least one woman director or partner. On the capital side, the Rs 10,000-crore Fund of Funds for Startups has committed money to 140+ AIFs, which have collectively invested Rs 25,500 crore in over 1,370 startups, while the Startup India Seed Fund Scheme, with a Rs 945-crore corpus, has approved funding for 215+ incubators to support early-stage ventures, as per PIB.