Indian tech startups raise $14.5 billion in 2019, up 25x from 2010

Technology startups in India in 2019 raised the second-highest amount of funding ($14.5 billion) in the last decade, according to startup information platform provider Tracxn Technologies. The only time they raised more money was in 2017 when the figure was about $15 billion.
 
Funding over the last decade increased by more than 25 times: From about $550 million in 2010 to $14.5 billion in 2019. During the year, there were 1,185 funding rounds of which 459 were beyond Series A, four public listings, 128 acquisitions and 817 active investors. Nearly 1,900 startups were founded in the year and close to 900 of them were funded.
 
Two deals raised a billion dollars or more each; of these, the highest was that of hotel booking provider Oyo Rooms, at $1.5 billion. Next came mobile wallet and financial services provider Paytm, which raised $1 billion.
 
Udaan, a business-to-business online commerce platform provider, raised $585 million while Delhivery, a logistics provider for online commerce businesses, raised $413 million. Ola, India’s biggest cab ride-hailing service provider, raised $300 million. Mission: Electric, an Ola spin-off focussed on electric vehicles, raised $250 million and Lenskart, a provider of prescription and fashion glasses, raised $230 million.
 
Among the investors, the top five most active venture capital firms were Sequoia Capital, Accel, Tiger Global Management, Blume Ventures and Chiratae Ventures. The most active private equity firms were Steadview Capital, General Atlantic, FMO, Sabre Partners India and CDC Group. The most active accelerators and incubators were Venture Catalysts, Y Combinator, Surge, Axilor Ventures and Techstars.
 
“The range of companies and sectors that are active today has broadened and deepened,” Dev Khare, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, told Forbes India last July. Before ecommerce took off in India, there weren’t too many sectors that were active in India. Over the last decade, “we’ve gone from ecommerce and a narrow definition of what a startup was to so many other sectors that are active”, he added.
 
The startup ecosystem has grown from 2006 for 12-13 years. “We now have founders coming back for the second time, some even for the third time to start up companies,” explains Khare. While the majority of the startups are still founded by first-time entrepreneurs, many more are second-time businessmen or have been executives in internet companies in India that have scaled, he said.