Union Minister Piyush Goyal on Friday asserted that not too many Indian startups have lost their unicorn status out of over 110 enterprises in the billion-dollar club in the country. The minister stated that there weren’t too many cases of startups being marked down from their $1 billion or above valuation recently.
“I checked this out. It happened more so in the last 12-13 months or 18 months. We have been monitoring but we didn’t find too many cases. We found one or two cases but there is no point in exaggeratedly discussing them. It is not that out of 110, we found 50 or 40 of them losing unicorn status,” Goyal told reporters ahead of the 9th anniversary of the Startup India initiative on January 16.
According to the data from Tracxn, there are 117 startups in India part of the unicorn club. However, the list also includes startups that were once valued at $1 billion or more but were later marked down by investors due to multiple factors such as Quikr, ShopClues, Hike, Paytm Mall, Byju’s, Unacademy, Gupshup, Pharmeasy, and others.
“Valuations are about market forces that determine them. Neither do we interfere when Zepto becomes a unicorn nor do we interfere when somebody’s valuation falls, it could be for mismanagement or lack of financial prudence,” Goyal said.
The minister said that “whenever the government get such examples of financial mismanagement, managerial incompetence, we pick those cases, ask the National Startup Advisory Council to study what has gone wrong and come up with some guidelines by which all startups can be encouraged to be beware of such practices and investors to keep their eyes open.”
Goyal also urged startups to follow “the law of the land” in carrying out business operations in the country. “My only submission would be that they have to make sure that they meet the law of the land, and whatever other legal requirements should be properly taken care of. No laws of the land should be broken,” the minister said on Blinkit’s recent launch of ambulance services in 10 minutes.