Orios Venture Partners, India’s leading early stage Venture Capital Fund today announced the release of its The Indian Unicorns and Exits Tech Report 2022. The report brought forth the decline in the average number of years required for a startup to become a unicorn. From taking 10 years in 2010, to now taking only 8.4 years in 2022 shows the abundant support available in form of mentorship and capital for the founders. India witnessed a total of 24 unicorns in 2022, making it the third nation to have 100 unicorns. Today, one unicorn out of every thirteen was born in India.
Startups raised $25 Bn in 2022, or almost 2.2X as much as they did in 2020. However, in 2022, startups also witnessed a 30% decline in funding compared to 2021. The number of Startups IPOs also declined to 4 in 2022 compared to 11 in 2021. The year also saw 229 acquisitions and 4 IPOs.
Despite the “funding winter”, the technology ecosystem in India saw abundant activity in 2022. Saas dethroned Fintech to become the sector with the largest number of Unicorns. This report also highlights the percentage of unicorn founders being repeat entrepreneurs as 25.2%. These founders bring with themselves the expertise and the experience to run a business. Further, Bengaluru remained the largest Unicorn hub in India and also emerged as the 7th largest unicorn hub of the world.
Commenting on the report, Rehan Yar Khan, Managing Partner, Orios Venture Partners said “India remains a global hotspot in technology company value creation with 22 Unicorns last year. This speaks for the deep adoption of tech across the country. The next phase of the Indian technology story will be graduating these Unicorns to exits via IPOs and the coming years should see a flurry of activity in that direction”
Some more key findings of the report are:
- Saas had the largest number of Unicorns in 2022 (6) ,followed by Fintech (4) and Logistics (3) and Edtech (2).
- There were 229 acquisitions in 2022 compared to 250 in 2021. MX Taka Tak acquired by Moj was the largest deal followed by Blinkit acquired by Zomato
- 80% of Indian Unicorns are founded by Engineers. While 75% of Unicorns are founded by first time founders
- Swiggy was added to the Decacorn list in 2022, making the count 5 so far
- 5ire became the fastest company to turn unicorn in 2022, reaching Unicorn status in a mere 11 months. Mobio became the slowest Unicorn last year taking 22 years to achieve Unicorn status.
