January 18, 2022

Indian Startup Ecosystem in 2022

The year 2021 is said to go down in history as the year of startup companies in India. Mr. Piyush Goyal mentioned in his address, at the Startup India Innovation Week inaugural ceremony that, we have around 82 unicorn startups in India. 43 of these startup companies in India were created and scaled past the $1 billion valuation mark within the last year. On average, that meant, the addition of one unicorn startup every 10 days in the year 2021. This trend has baffled and left everyone from investors to venture capitalists to other national and international stakeholders excited and eagerly anticipating what’s to come next in terms of investments in 2022.

The startup ecosystem in India is globally the third largest at the moment, with unicorns cumulatively valued at $168 billion, and this trend has no intention of slowing down. The D2C startup ‘Mamaearth’ is closing its recent funding round at $1.2 billion, making it the first unicorn of 2022. A minimum of five more startup companies in India are queued up to go public in the first half of this year. These unicorns have emerged from a broad range of sectors such as e-commerce, SaaS, B2B markets, EdTech and HealthTech, and consumer-driven products and services.

Let’s take a look at the potential of the startup ecosystem in India in 2022:

India is headed in the direction of building a model accelerated by innovation and entrepreneurship and giving the rest of the world tough competition. Startup companies in India are disrupting marketplaces by challenging the status quo.

To kick-start the year, India set up its first-ever Startup innovation week where the much anticipated Open Network for Digital Commerce – digital strategy is set to be launched on the 13th of January. This policy is believed to connect the gap between rising local startups and global eCommerce giants, on a digital commerce platform.

The startup ecosystem in India is said to undergo active changes, and Indian founders have vowed to continue to build innovative companies in trending investment sectors such as deep tech (space drones & 5G, etc.), AgriTech, D2C, Cybersecurity, manufacturing tech etc. Global and domestic investors will increase their focus on India in order to stimulate the growth of these companies, and also to provide outstanding returns to early investors.

There is a growing demand for talent across industries, resulting in a race for aptitude to sustain growth. The addition of new startups, increased funding, the rise of unicorns, and the adoption of deep India will all help to accelerate the startup companies in India’s goal of a $1 trillion USD digital economy.

There has also been a surge in ‘soonicorns’ who didn’t meet the $1 billion mark to turn into unicorns in the last year, lined up to make 2022 their breakthrough year. Companies such as – Jupiter, Cleartax, Dunzo, Zapto & freshtohome are all examples of soonicorns to watch out for in 2022.

Founders today want to create global businesses from the start, and their scale ambitions are unprecedented. The decade to follow should witness an exponential rise in digital innovation across the consumer internet sector. This is also because the number of internet users in rural areas is projected to surpass urban users. In addition, small and medium businesses (SMBs) and, of course, Global SaaS will also be beneficiaries.

Over the last two decades, the Indian startup ecosystem has evolved dynamically. Incomes and purchasing power in India are rising steadily as the economy expands. Rising consumption is being driven by the expansion of the upper-middle and high-income segments of the population, which will increase from one in every four households today to one in every two households by 2030. Outlining policy measures to boost entrepreneurship and the startup ecosystem in India, the minister of commerce announced that patent filing fees have been reduced to 20% of the normal, and the government will also be giving a 50% discount on trademark filing fees clubbed with tax incentives and other sops.