National capital Delhi is a start-up hotbed and most number of Indian unicorns have emerged from the city. With over 7000 start-ups from the region, Delhi has also seen the highest number of active start-ups in the country and now the valuation of the city’s start-ups is about $50 billion, according to TIE Delhi NCR start-up report released on Tuesday. Also, with the pace that the start-up ecosystem is growing and with appropriate interventions, “Delhi-NCR will become one of the top five global start-up hubs with 12,000 start-ups, 30 unicorns and cumulative valuation of about $150 billion by 2025,” the report added.
However, while 1657 start-ups were founded in 2015 in NCR, the same has only gone downward since then and in the first half of the current year, only 142 new start-ups have emerged. To give a fillip to start-ups ecosystem, several issues need to be addressed, “including the need for a lot more seed and early-stage funding, creating more affordable co-working spaces, increasing the number and quality of accelerators and incubators, developing deeper pools of technical talent and developing sector-specific policies,” the TIE, Zinnov report said.
Delhi-NCR has churned out the most number of unicorns in India and since 2013, at least one unicorn has emerged out of the region every year. With a total unicorn count of 10, Delhi has left behind India’s Silicon Valley Bengaluru, and other prominent cities including Mumbai, Chennai and Pune. On an average, it took 5-6 years for Delhi’s unicorn companies to achieve the feat. This includes Ritesh Agarwal-founded Oyo Rooms, Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s Paytm, Delhivery, Hike, Rivigo, Deppinder Goyal’s Zomato, Policybazaar, Snapdeal, ReNew Power and Paytm Mall.
Further, Delhi-NCR is also home to the three out of the four most valuable listed internet companies. This includes Infoedge with the market capitalization of $3670 million, Make My Trip with m-cap of $2420 million and India Mat with the valuation of $490 million. Only JustDial from the list does not belong to NCR.
India is already the third-largest destination for start-ups in the world and is soon expected to lead as a unicorn destination, a joint report by CREDAI, CBRE said in August.