Close to half of India's billion dollar-plus tech ventures—26 till mid-August—have emerged in 2021. Two dozen unicorns have emerged in just eight months. Can they keep galloping?
In 2016, India had five unicorns in the elite club—a breakout moment considering that between 2011 and 2015, the country had produced six unicorns
Krishna Depura is blessed with an elephant’s memory. What he prefers to talk about, though, is a mythical animal, and an unprecedented moment, which he witnessed a decade ago. In 2011, InMobi, a privately-held mobile adtech startup, turned unicorn with a value of over a billion dollars. “It was like wow,” recalls the co-founder of sales readiness platform Mindtickle. In September that year, SoftBank had handed InMobi a hefty cheque of $200 million, making it India’s first unicorn. Around the same time—August 2011—Depura, along with three friends, turned entrepreneur by embarking on a virtual treasure hunt. The engineers rolled out Mindtickle, which started as a gamification platform for corporates.
Five years later in Bengaluru, Prem Pavoor was witnessing the birth of more unicorns. “We saw a few companies getting to a billion-dollar valuation,” recalls the partner and head of India at Eight Roads Ventures, a VC fund that backs growth-stage firms. In 2016, India had five unicorns in the elite club—a breakout moment considering that between 2011 and 2015, the country had produced six unicorns.
Fast forward to 2021. It’s a déjà vu moment for Depura, who has now joined the party. Mindtickle is one of the 26 unicorns that have emerged in just eight months this year. Depura first mimics the reaction of the people who are flabbergasted with the charge of unicorns. “It is like, OMG! Every Tom, Dick and Harry is becoming a unicorn,” he says. The common sentiment echoing, he adds, is like “arey iska bhi ho gaya, uska bhi ho gaya, hum bhi kar lete toh hamara bhi ho jaata… (everybody is becoming a unicorn. Had we tried, we would have also become one).”
Depura is at pains to point out that it “didn’t happen overnight”. It took Mindtickle 10 years to get to the prized valuation. Ditto with most of the other unicorns, which have slogged for years. Some of them, adds Depura, have been there for seven, eight, nine years, and had been silently working. Now when people see unicorns raining, they think it’s a sudden thing. “It’s not,” smiles Depura, who uses the analogy of a bamboo to explain the unicorn rush. Nobody notices bamboos during their formative years. They grow, but stay under the radar. And suddenly, one fine day they just shoot through the roof, and start getting attention. “Startups are like bamboos,” he smiles.
(This story appears in the 10 September, 2021 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)