Indian founders account for $560B unicorn valuation overseas: report

Founders who grew up in India account for $560 billion of founder-share-attributed company value in current and former unicorns abroad, according to the new Indian Diaspora Index from Prosus and Dealroom.

Based on the methodology used by the index, the value is an indicative figure and not based on actual shareholding of the individual founders.

"Founders who grew up in India account for $560 billion of founder-share-attributed company value in current and former unicorns abroad," the index report said.

To arrive at the valuation, the index took each company’s valuation and divided it equally among the founders, then counted the slice attributable to qualifying Indian-origin founders, regardless of their actual ownership.

"In contrast, 102 unicorns based in India account for approximately $349 billion on a founder-share basis, led by Flipkart ($36 billion), Zomato ($30 billion), and Groww ($16 billion)," the report said.

The Index showed that 70 unicorns worth $243 billion were built by all-Indian founders such as Jay Chaudhry (Zscaler), Arvind Jain, Arvind Nithrakashyap, Bipul Sinha and Soham Mazumdar (Rubrik), Ajeet Singh, Dheeraj Pandey and Mohit Aron (Nutanix), and Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta (Skild).

Another 135 unicorns with Indian-origin founders in the core team, such as Palo Alto, Bloom Energy, Astera Labs and Perplexity, contributed $317 billion on this founder-share basis.

Prosus India Principal Investor Saurav Jain said that Indian founders have the ability to turn technology, ingenuity and deep local insight into businesses that can fundamentally change how people live and work.

"Indian Diaspora Index measures something we have seen and experienced first-hand in India: exceptional talent density with the ambition to build at enormous scale, often by solving some of the country's most complex and consequential problems. That is what has kept us investing in the country for nearly two decades," he said.

The report said that a separate, broader birth-origin analysis shows that 62 per cent of its companies are based in the United States, making it the dominant ecosystem for Indian-origin founders building high-value companies.

"In total, 200 of the 323 companies in this broader cohort were either started (178) or relocated (22) to the United States. This birth-origin analysis includes founders who left India as children and companies based in India. It is separate from the narrower overseas index of founders who grew up in India," the report said.