Founders who grew up in India have built a significant part of the global startup economy, with companies ranging from cybersecurity firms in Silicon Valley to startups in Gurugram.
According to new data from Prosus and Dealroom, current and former unicorns founded or co-founded by people who grew up in India have a combined valuation of about $1.09 trillion when the full value of each company is counted.
Using a founder-share calculation, the value attributed to India-raised founders comes to about $560 billion for companies based outside India. The figure includes companies such as Zscaler, Rubrik, Nutanix and Perplexity.
The findings are part of the Indian Diaspora Index, a joint project by Prosus and Dealroom. The index tracks 205 current and former unicorns based outside India that have at least one founder who grew up in the country.
The scale of India’s founder diaspora
Dealroom analysis looks at where unicorn founders were born rather than where they grew up. It finds that people born in India have founded 323 unicorns worldwide. Of these, 200 are based in the United States, 102 are based in India and 21 are based in other countries. That means about 62% of the 323 companies are based in the US.
The count includes founders who left India as children. It is different from the Indian Diaspora Index, which only includes founders who grew up in India and companies based outside India.The 323 unicorns have 638 founder seats held by people born in India. Of the 323 companies:
178 were started directly in the US
22 were started elsewhere and later moved to the US
102 were built in India
21 were built in other countries
Dealroom’s founder DNA database has 8,796 unicorn founders worldwide. Of these, 3,173 are from the US, 2,016 from Europe, 1,152 from China, 638 from India and 420 from Israel. The Indian Diaspora Index includes founders who grew up in India.
People who were born in India but left before the age of 16 are not included in the main index. It also only looks at unicorns based outside India. Companies built in India are tracked separately as a homegrown category.
The 205 overseas unicorns are divided into two groups. The first group has 70 unicorns where all the founders grew up in India. These companies have a combined value of about $243 billion.
This group includes Zscaler, Rubrik, Nutanix, Icertis and Skild. The second group has 135 unicorns with mixed founding teams. In these companies, only the share attributed to founders who grew up in India is counted. This comes to about $317 billion.
This group includes Palo Alto Networks, Bloom Energy, Astera Labs, Perplexity, Toast and Rippling. The two groups account for about $560 billion on a founder-share basis.
The $560 billion figure does not represent the founders’ personal wealth or their actual ownership in these companies. Dealroom divides a company’s value equally among its founders and counts only the portions linked to founders who grew up in India.
For example, if a company is valued at $10 billion and has four founders, each founder is assigned $2.5 billion under this method. If one founder grew up in India, $2.5 billion would be counted towards the Indian founder value.
The homegrown layer
Dealroom also tracks unicorns that were built in India. The data puts the value of 101 India-based unicorns at about $349 billion on the same founder-share basis.
Some of the largest companies in this group include Flipkart at $36 billion, Zomato at about $30 billion, Groww at $16 billion, Lenskart at $16 billion, One97 at $14 billion and Meesho at $13 billion.
This gives two different pictures of India’s startup ecosystem. One is the growing number of companies being built within India. The other is the large group of founders who grew up in India and went on to build companies in overseas markets.
Founders who left India as children
Some founders born in India are not included in the main Indian Diaspora Index because they left the country before the age of 16. The group includes Hemant Taneja of Commure, who left India at 15, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, who left at nine, Nav Sooch of Silicon Laboratories, who left at 10, and Jagdeep Singh of QuantumScape, who left at 15. Adding this group would increase the index value by about $14 billion.
Where the money sits
Palo Alto Networks is the largest company in the index, with a valuation of about $275 billion. Rajiv Batra is one of its five founders, so 20% of the company’s value, or about $55 billion, is attributed to the India-raised founder share. Bloom Energy follows at about $76 billion. KR Sridhar is one of its two founders, giving the India-raised founder share a value of about $38 billion.
Astera Labs is valued at about $48 billion. Jitendra Mohan is one of its founders, with two-thirds of the company attributed to the founder group used in the calculation, giving an India-raised founder share of about $32 billion. Zscaler, founded by Jay Chaudhry, is valued at about $25 billion. Since Chaudhry is the sole founder counted in the index, the full value is attributed to him.
Other companies among the top 25 include Perplexity at $20 billion, Rubrik at $18 billion, Nutanix at $17 billion, Rippling at $17 billion, Toast at $17 billion and Skild at $14 billion. Some companies have already been acquired, including GlobalLogic, Penumbra, Adenza, Confluent and Lacework. Several others, including Palo Alto Networks, Bloom Energy, Zscaler, Rubrik, Nutanix and Toast, are publicly listed.
The US is the main destination
The US accounts for most of the overseas companies in the index. Of the 205 companies, 187, or about 91%, are based in the US. Eighteen companies were originally founded in India and later moved overseas. In the group of 323 unicorns with founders born in India, 200 are based in the US. This includes companies that were started in the US as well as companies that moved there later.
Where founders studied
The data also looks at the education backgrounds of founders. Across 305 unicorns, the study mapped 615 founder-company seats by company location. About 310 seats were linked to companies in the US and 279 to companies in India.
The San Francisco Bay Area and the wider US West Coast had the largest concentration, with 191 founder seats. New York and Boston were among the other major clusters.
IIT Delhi produced the highest number of founders in the data, with 47. Stanford followed with 37, while IIT Bombay had 31 and IIT Madras had 28. IIM Ahmedabad and IIT Kanpur had 25 founders each, while IIT Kharagpur had 22.
Among founders whose highest qualification was recorded, 144 had a bachelor’s degree, 110 had a master’s degree, 100 had an MBA and 47 had a doctorate. The highest qualification was not recorded for 199 founders. By field of study, 238 founders came from technical backgrounds, 86 had backgrounds combining technology and business, and 76 had studied business.