{"id":125317,"date":"2025-05-23T13:12:09","date_gmt":"2025-05-23T13:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/125317\/"},"modified":"2025-05-23T13:12:09","modified_gmt":"2025-05-23T13:12:09","slug":"u-s-venture-capital-pours-into-indias-tech-sector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/125317\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. venture capital pours into India\u2019s tech sector"},"content":{"rendered":"

A thousand unicorns. That\u2019s how many billion-dollar startups India could produce over the next two decades \u2014 and it\u2019s why investors are betting on it to power the world\u2019s next great tech surge. One of those investors is Aditya Mishra, a Columbia and GW Business School grad and former exec at Yahoo (APO<\/a>) and Accenture (ACN<\/a>), who now leads BAT VC, a $100 million early-stage venture fund focused on AI-first startups in India and the U.S.<\/p>\n

But the potential is not the result of a sudden shift. As Mishra sees it, this moment has been decades in the making. \u201cIndia has all the ingredients to be at par with China and the U.S.,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

India\u2019s tech sector has evolved, too \u2014 well beyond its outsourcing origins<\/p>\n

Global tech companies opening Indian operations have created similar dynamics to Silicon Valley as ex-Google (GOOGL<\/a>), Meta (META<\/a>), 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. <\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s no wonder India has emerged as the world\u2019s third-largest startup ecosystem<\/a>.<\/p>\n

U.S. venture capital is already following the signal<\/p>\n

While the country\u2019s economic liberalization began in the 1990s, a more recent wave of \u201cChina-plus-one<\/a>\u201d strategies \u2014 accelerated by trade tensions, supply chain recalibration, and geopolitical reshuffling \u2014 is bringing fresh foreign interest. \u201cYou\u2019re seeing a shift toward bilateral trade agreements,\u201d Mishra said, arguing that venture capital should reflect that realignment.<\/p>\n

BAT VC\u2019s thesis<\/a> is built around dual-market value creation: backing U.S. startups expanding into India and Indian startups with global ambitions. Mishra estimates the bidirectional model can generate 1.5 to 2 times the return of regionally siloed investments. It\u2019s an arbitrage opportunity most VCs are still missing, Mishra said.<\/p>\n

Of course, structural challenges remain, from uneven regulatory enforcement to governance issues. But for investors willing to take the long view, Mishra sees an inflection point. The key to understanding the opportunity is recognizing that \u201cIndia has many Indias in it.\u201d It\u2019s a country where world-class innovation exists alongside massive inequality, and where seemingly contradictory trends reflect a bigger picture. <\/p>\n

\u201cEverything can be true at once,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

That complexity isn\u2019t a bug \u2014 it\u2019s what gives Indian startups an edge<\/p>\n

When you build in India, you\u2019re building for scale, for fragmentation, for some regulatory ambiguity, as well as for different languages, payments, and regions, Mishra explained. That\u2019s precisely what prepares Indian tech companies to go global.<\/p>\n

For U.S. investors, he believes the message is simple: The next twenty years of tech growth won\u2019t look like the last twenty. Everyday investors may get exposure to India\u2019s tech scene through ETFs, but there\u2019s a case for the more direct VC play, too. Venture in India (and elsewhere) represents the business of tomorrow, Mishra argued. \u201cEverything else is the business of today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Analysts beyond BAT are seeing the same signal. In a 2023 report<\/a>, Goldman Sachs (GS<\/a>) projected India could overtake the U.S. by 2075 to become the second-largest economy in the world. While the timeline may vary depending on who\u2019re you\u2019re speaking to, the underlying logic remains consistent: India\u2019s young population, rapidly growing tech sector, and expanding capital markets create a compelling story, playing out in real time. <\/p>\n

In the meantime, the idea of 1,000 unicorns is a fun future to contemplate \u2014 and to quantify<\/p>\n

Assuming a baseline valuation of $1 billion apiece, that would mean $1 trillion in startup value alone. But the math gets even wilder fast. If India\u2019s unicorns follow the path of U.S. giants such as Stripe, SpaceX, or OpenAI \u2014 or even local standouts like Flipkart (WMT<\/a>) and BYJU\u2019S \u2014 average valuations could land much higher.<\/p>\n

Run the numbers and you\u2019re looking at anywhere from $2 to $5 trillion in private or potentially public market value over the next few decades. That\u2019s an industrial shift to echo Silicon Valley itself or the Chinese tech boom. India may still be building its tech future, but if the unicorn count is even half right, the scale of what\u2019s coming is hard to ignore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A thousand unicorns. That\u2019s how many billion-dollar startups India could produce over the next two decades \u2014 and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125318,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3094],"tags":[32123,55544,51,26165,3490,3134,474,6073,2792,867,1318,17621,8177,4806,1603,26164,55546,16,28591,55545,15,3141,26529],"class_list":{"0":"post-125317","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-accenture","9":"tag-aditya-mishra","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-corporate-finance","12":"tag-deep-tech","13":"tag-entrepreneurship","14":"tag-finance","15":"tag-flipkart","16":"tag-goldman-sachs","17":"tag-google","18":"tag-openai","19":"tag-private-equity","20":"tag-quartz","21":"tag-silicon-valley","22":"tag-spacex","23":"tag-startup-company","24":"tag-u-s-venture","25":"tag-uk","26":"tag-unicorn","27":"tag-unicorn-bubble","28":"tag-united-kingdom","29":"tag-venture-capital","30":"tag-yahoo"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114557324137169634","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125317\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}