Catherine Baab
4 min read
A thousand unicorns. That’s how many billion-dollar startups India could produce over the next two decades — and it’s why investors are betting on it to power the world’s next great tech surge. One of those investors is Aditya Mishra, a Columbia and GW Business School grad and former exec at Yahoo (APO) and Accenture (ACN), who now leads BAT VC, a $100 million early-stage venture fund focused on AI-first startups in India and the U.S.
But the potential is not the result of a sudden shift. As Mishra sees it, this moment has been decades in the making. “India has all the ingredients to be at par with China and the U.S.,” he told Quartz, backing it up with numbers: 800 million people under 35, a vast, extraordinarily tech-savvy educated class, and Indian capital itself stepping up to the plate.
A decade ago, 75% of Indian IPO funding came from abroad, Mishra points out. Now, domestic investors account for up to 80%. Brokerage accounts have jumped from 36 million in 2020 to 160 million in 2024, which makes for an increasingly liquid financial ecosystem, helping further de-risk the environment for foreign investors.
Global tech companies opening Indian operations have created similar dynamics to Silicon Valley as ex-Google (GOOGL), Meta (META), and OpenAI engineers and executives strike out on their own, founding startups that aim at both domestic and global growth, with innovation concentrated in AI, ML, robotics, deeptech, logistics, and fintech. Its AI sector alone is seeing 32% annual growth.
That momentum is beginning to show up in public markets, too: India led the world with 338 IPOs in 2024, a 44% increase from the previous year, raising nearly $21 billion.
As these homegrown companies come up within the complex linguistic, economic and social environment of modern India, they run up against and solve the exact sort of complicated problems that allow them to grow into global entities. Think cross-border payments and sophisticated supply chains. So it’s no wonder India has emerged as the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem.
While the country’s economic liberalization began in the 1990s, a more recent wave of “China-plus-one” strategies — accelerated by trade tensions, supply chain recalibration, and geopolitical reshuffling — is bringing fresh foreign interest. “You’re seeing a shift toward bilateral trade agreements,” Mishra said, arguing that venture capital should reflect that realignment.
