Most of you might be wondering what unicorn startups actually are? Well you might have heard or seen a unicorn, an imaginary animal renowned for its beauty and grace, in cartoon channels popping up in your television screens. But in the M&A world it altogether has a different meaning. It refers to a company whose present valuation has surpassed the mark of $1 billion. There are about 230 unicorn start-ups across the globe. Amidst that, there are 8 Indian start-ups that have crossed the hurdles and stepped into the billion dollar club. Let’s look into these 8 companies.
Flipkart
Flipkart has emerged out to be as one of the largest e-commerce brand across the nation and hence one of the major unicorn startups. It is the success story of two friends, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, who coincidentally met each other at IIT Delhi, worked at Amazon Web services for a few years and then finally, left their jobs to set on their journey of begetting their dream what we know as Flipkart today. It has its headquarters in Bengaluru, India. Flipkart stands way ahead of all other start-ups in India I terms of its valuation.
Investors:- Vulcan Capital, GIC private, New Enterprise associates, Morgan Stanley Private equity
Valuation:- $15.5 billion
Funding equity:- $3 billion
Rounds of Funding:- 9
Foundation Year:- 2007
Read full story of how Flipkart went from scratch to zenith here.
Snapdeal
This is yet another e-commerce company of Indian origin that has been founded in 2010 by two childhood bosom buddies, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal. The initial idea of Snapdeal was a coupon site, greatly influenced by Groupon Inc. But later, in 2011; they deflected their business model to an online marketing portfolio, vending all possible goods from clothing to accessories to electronics and what not. Despite the brittle competition it has been receiving from Amazon and Flipkart, the company has created its own steps towards the sky. Recently when Snapdeal grabbed hold of Freecharge and brought it under its control, investors like Sequoia Capital India, Sofina and Tybourne Capital also became shareholders of Snapdeal.
Investors:- Alibaba Group Holding, Nexus Venture Partners, Softbank Japan, eBay,Sequoia Capital India, Sofina and Tybourne Capital
Valuation:- $5 billion
Funding equity:- $911million
Rounds of Funding:- 8
Foundation Year:- 2010
Mu Sigma
The name of the company, “Mu Sigma”, has been derived from the conglomeration of two greek letters, mu and sigma, widely used in Maths and Statitics. As a management consulting firm, primarily offering analytics services, this Indian origin start-up was founded by Dhiraj Rajaram, a former strategy consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers and Booz Allen Hamilton, in the year of 2004. With its headquarters centered at Chicago, this data-analytics consulting firm helps in the elucidation of customers query with the aid of a huge database, contrived by the data it assembled from its customers. The report as portrayed by IDC is indicative of the fact that the data growth rate is 40% and with this rate it will reach a gigantic memory size of 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020. It has offered a stiff competition to companies like Cognizant technology solutions, Tata consultancy services, Latent view Analytics and many more.
Investors:- Sequoia Investors, General Atlantic and Mastercard Advisors.
Valuation:- $1.5 billion
Funding equity:- $195 million
Rounds of Funding:- 4
Foundation Year:- 2004
Quikr
Quikr is an advertisement based Indian start-up that has successfully made into the billion dollar club. Quikr was founded by Pranay Chulet and Jiby Thomas in 2008 with its headquarters centered at Bengaluru. In November 2005 Kijiji India was launched and was owned by Kijiji International, an eBay Inc subsidory. Later in 2008, Matrix partners India, Mumbai based venture capitalist had invested in Kijiji, which made the company independent and was rebranded as “Quikr”. An easy and impromptu way of selling and buying goods and services through an online advertisement platform has always remained the sole motive of the company.
Investors:- Tiger Global Investment, Nokia growth partners, eBay, Norwest Venture partners and Warburg Pincus.
Valuation:- $1 billion
Funding equity:- $350 million
Rounds of Funding:- 5
Foundation Year:- 2008
Ola Cabs
India’s biggest Taxi hailing company, Ola cabs, was started by Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati, two alumni of IIT Bombay on 3rd December, 2010. It started out as a cab aggregator in Mumbai but presently it has reached out to more than 50 cities across the country. Ola is considered to be one of the most successful start-ups in India. It provides an end user service where the users book their cabs through a mobile based application. The number, type and variety of cabs offered are such that it succumbs to every possible range requirement. Recently, the company has taken over Taxi For Sure (TFS), another cab aggregator of Indian origin.
Investors:- Accel Partners, DST global, Tiger Global Management, DidiKuaidi joint, Sequoia Capital etc.
Valuation:- $5 billion
Funding equity:- $350 million
Rounds of Funding:- 7
Foundation Year:- 2010
Related: Ola or Uber- Who is going to survive finally?
Paytm
Paytm or Pay through Mobile is yet another app based Indian unicorn start-up, founded by Vijay Shekhar Sharma in 2010 with its headquarters located in Noida, India. It is owned by One97 communications. One97 communications was started in 2001, an era when mobile phones had just started entering the lives of common people in India, and served as a website acting as a content providing platform, even allowing users an easy top-up on their mobile phone numbers. Later on it added some more features to the existing site and like adding bill payment and e-commerce and baptized the company as Paytm. Features like booking bus tickets and booking movie tickets were added in 2015 and 2016 sequentially. Some of its major competitors are PayU, Mobikwik and Oxigen Wallet. It is taking several steps and collaborating with all possible small and big players to revolutionize the way we see payments.
Investors:- Sapphire Investors, Micro Financial services, Silicon Valley bank, SAIF Partners
Valuation:- $2 billion
Funding equity:- $593 million
Rounds of Funding:- 4
Foundation Year:- 2010
InMobi
InMobi was founded the Naveen Tewari in 2007 which is basically a mobile advertisement and discovery platform. It has its headquarters in Bengaluru. InMobi was initially started as an SMS based search platform known as mKhoj but later in 2007, it shifted to a business model that could be scaled better than the previous one and named it InMobi. It also won a spot in the 50 most disruptive companies of the world in MIT Technology review. The biggest Tech giant companies, Google and Facebook are the major competitors of InMobi. It has successfully emerged to be one of the most important unicorn startups of the country, of course, for good reasons!
Investors:- Sherpalo Ventures, Klenier Perkins Caufield& Buyers and Softbank corp.
Valuation:- $2.5 billion
Funding equity:- $216 million
Rounds of Funding:- 4
Foundation Year:- 2007
Shopclues.com
Founded by Sanjay Sethi and Sandeep Aggarwal in the year of 2011, with its headquarters in Gurgaon, India, Shopclues is yet another e-commerce based Indian start-up that has commanded big venture dollars and ventured into the list of the unicorn startups in India. Investors like invested into this company. It handles about 1.8 million annual transactions and 42 million annual visitors.
Investors:- Atlantic ventures, Tiger Global Management, GIC private, Helion Venture partners and Beenos partners.
Valuation:- $1.1 billion
Funding equity:- $468 million
Rounds of Funding:- 6
Foundation Year:- 2011
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