Indian tech startups have been growing day by day becoming more mainstreamed by boosting entrepreneurship as well as the local venture capital industry. In the past 30 months, the top 10 Indian venture capitalists have participated in about 600 funding rounds and also backed 420 ventures which are interesting to know. Mumbai-based Blume Ventures tops the list backing around 145 startups until now. Next on the list comes Matrix Partners India, which comes next to Blume Ventures with 86 deals and 55 portfolio companies.
Though the largest tech startups across the globe are still foreign, the Indian venture capital industry is trying to contribute its best. The strategies of the Indian venture capital industry have been evolving day by day and year by year to bring in unique perspectives that their foreign counterparts cannot.
When we go back to the timeline a decade ago, there were only four to five startups that were active in the Indian venture capital industry that were making safer bets in the enterprise space. And on the other side are the risk-takers such as Flipkart, Paytm which have been ruling the world already. And the major reason for this scarcity in the Indian venture capital industry is due to lack of great investment options.
But now many diverse technologies experimenting with unicorns are coming up in India where there has been a rapid acceleration in the startups being launched too. The increase in the investment options has boosted the investors in India the courage to bet on the local firms. And most of the online companies such as groceries, entertainment, and edtech have been benefitted from Covid-19 lockdowns to a great extent. In 2020, Indian startups have raised about the US $10 billion across more than 1,200 deals even though the total investment was lower than that of 2019.
But when we look at the top 10 most active Indian venture capital firms, eight are headed by men as of the west. Gender diversity is lacking here too. Only a few women entrepreneurs have been getting into this sector. Only 13% of unicorns in India have a female co-founder and women are sole founders of less than 6% of the startups in India. So bridging this divide of age, gender, race, caste can prove to be the key to the success of the Indian venture capital industry.