How startups are rewriting India's IPO story
The IPO market in the country is not simply bigger than it was a decade ago. It has a different character and discipline now, led by confident, high-growth startups who believe in the India story.
Ask any middle class Indian family what an IPO meant 15 years ago, and the answer would usually be the same. A trip to the nearest bank branch. A paper form with multiple carbon copies and a company name, maybe a PSU or a pharma firm or something your CA had quietly recommended over lunch. You did not invest in these companies because you were excited about them. You invested because they felt safe.
Then something shifted. India's primary market did not just grow. It changed its personality.
The numbers tell the story, but only a part of it. In 2024, India became the world's largest IPO market by volume, hosting more listings than the US and China. In 2025, total IPO fundraising crossed Rs 1.75 lakh crore for the calendar year, according to a report by Blume Ventures. India’s market capitalisation now sits at $4.9 trillion, NSE’s Market Pulse report says. These numbers are impressive. But they don't quite explain why any of it happened.
What actually happened is that startups made investing feel personal for the first time.
Between 2023 and 2025, the number of IPOs of new-age tech companies in India grew from 5 to 18, raising a cumulative Rs 70,000 crore across these three years, according to media reports.
But the more important shift was what these listings meant to ordinary investors. Swiggy, Ola Electric, FirstCry, and others were not just companies arriving on Dalal Street. They were already in people’s lives: in their kitchens, during their commute, and on weekends. For the first time, applying for an IPO felt like owning something you already believed in.
That emotional connection was powerful. It was also, at times, a problem. Familiarity with a brand and understanding of a business are not the same thing. GMP, allotment probability, and listing day gains became the primary vocabulary of IPO participation, with actual business quality somewhere further down the list. By March 2026, roughly 55% of 2025’s startup IPOs were trading below their issue price, as per a Wise Lane market analysis. The excitement had been real. The discipline had lagged.
What followed was exactly the kind of correction a healthy market is supposed to produce. Companies went back to basics. OYO is a good example of how this played out. The company had bled over Rs 1,200 crore in FY23, spent the next two years restructuring aggressively, and showed up at Dalal Street's door only after its core operations turned profitable for the first time in nine months of FY2026. It filed its DRHP shortly after.
SEBI moved in the same direction. Recent reforms expanded the anchor investor pool to 40%, bringing in pension and insurance funds that have no appetite for governance shortcuts. For the SME segment, minimum EBITDA thresholds were introduced, requiring profitability in at least two of the three preceding years. NSE EMERGE has seen 730 companies list since inception and 160 graduate to the mainboard. That graduation rate says more about the real depth of India’s market than any single headline number.
The most telling signal has been who is choosing India. Flipkart redomiciled from Singapore back to India in March 2026, a structurally complex and expensive move that companies make only when they genuinely believe in the depth of the local market. Beyond that one headline, the broader shift is visible everywhere. High-growth startups that could have pursued overseas listings are coming to Dalal Street instead. That was not always the obvious choice. The fact that it now is says something meaningful.
And the pipeline reflects exactly that confidence. OYO, Zepto, Zetwerk, PhonePe, and Cult.fit alone have IPO filings on record worth more than Rs 30,000 crore through their pending IPOs. Flipkart’s much larger offering, still without a DRHP on file, is expected to add substantially more once terms are set. Boat, which shelved its 2022 IPO plans, came back with a revised filing. Behind all of them sit Reliance Jio, which filed its DRHP in June 2026 targeting what would be the largest IPO in Indian history, and NSE itself, now finally preparing to list on its own terms. The queue has never looked like this before.
India's IPO market is not simply bigger than it was a decade ago. It has a different character and discipline now. Whether that holds as the pipeline opens is the only question that matters.
The author is the founder of Pocketful, a stock trading and investment platform.
Edited by Swetha Kannan