India’s Top Ten Unicorn Startups & their Success Stories

As fancy as the name sounds, unicorn startups, like unicorns are startups that have made a mark and attracted public’s attention. To put it in technical (yet super simple) terms, it refers to a company that in its current valuation has surpassed $1 billion. Yes, that’s huge. Now if you’ve also been wondering what kind of companies make it to the billion dollar start up club, here’s fetching the answer for you. While you may have already known many of these billion dollar companies, their success story is what we’re going to uncover, for their lies tons of inspiration and positivity (we all could do with some of that, couldn’t we?)
List of the top seven Indian unicorn startups:
All unicorn startups start with ideas, ideas that get materialized into a business and business that grows and spreads it’s wings so wide that even the founder is left elated. The following Indian companies are officially billion dollar startups, let’s dig deeper into their rags to riches stories:
I. Flipkart

Valuation: $11.6
Founding date: 5th September 2007
Industry: E-commerce
Founders: Binny Bansal & Sachin Bansal
Success Story: The founders, Binny and Sanjay were IITans working at Amazon.com back in 2007 when they took a revolutionary step of quitting the financially stable job to start a new e-commerce website for India. Given the then mindset of Indians, they would rather shop in markets in person than buy in online- this was certainly a risky move. But we guess, they say it right, luck favors the brave! Flipkart started selling books at first and slowly took on different products as well. Another fun trivia about Flipkart is that they were the first e-commerce platform to introduce ‘Cash on Delivery’ option for customers. Today, Flipkart, by all means, is one of the most massive and famous websites in India.
II. Snapdeal

Valuation: $7
Founding date: 4th February 2010
Industry: E Commerce
Founders: Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal
Success Story: The most interesting part of Snapdeal’s success story is the pace at which they’ve gained momentum and have managed to make a place in the billion dollar startup club. Snapdeal had a rather different founding story- they started off as an offline coupon business (named Money Saver) and the success and profits they got out of it paved the path to what we today know as Snapdeal. They soon got investors to believe in their ideas and passion and shut the offline business and took the virtual world by a storm. The initial months were a rocky hill for them, but the bottom line is, they learned from their mistakes, only to never repeat them again.
III. One 97Communications (Paytm)

Valuation: $5.7
Founding date: 2000 (Paytm:2010)
Industry: E-Commerce
Founders: Vijay Shekhar Sharma
Success Story: Paytm- Pay through Mobile- was especially in buzz earlier last year when PM Narendra Modi made the demonetization announcement. Amidst panic and worries, Paytm emerged as the most used exchange medium during that time. This was definitely the high point of their success story. Tracing back a little, Paytm is owned by One97 Communications and is headquartered at Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India. From the wallet to the Paytm Bank, this platform knows no boundaries and has been progressing at a super-fast rate. They’ve now made a safe place in the billion dollar companies list. Suffice to say, Paytm is slowly overtaking the paper currency, only for good. Go, Digital India!
IV. Ola Cabs

Valuation: $3.65
Founding Date: 27th October 2014
Industry: On-Demand (Transportation)
Founder: Bhavish Aggarwal
Success Story: Ola can be transferred to ‘Hello’ in Spanish. They started on a ‘zero’ inventory model, which basically means that Ola dint buy a single car, they only bridged the gap between the riders and the drivers through a virtual medium- the internet. The zero inventory model helped them gain confidence in their project as the risk factors were now minimized. What fuelled their road to success was MCommerce (Mobile) and their app became increasingly popular. The facility of quality service clubbed with a safety insurance is what has helped Ola cabs enter the list of unicorn startups. Giving a good competition to it’s competitors, Ola has also tied up with Autos and shuttles, so now their scope is not just limited to cabs, it’s got a whole new wide range.
V. ReNew Power Ventures

Valuation: $2
Founding Date: 2011
Industry: Energies and utilities
Founder: Sumant Sinha
Success Story: Well, this has one of the most unique stories of all the other unicorn startups mentioned in this list! To start with it, Sumant Sinha ended up being an engineer and an entrepreneur by chance. He had initially taken admission in Delhi’s famous St.Stephens college. But during that year, due to some strike, the college opened late and hence he took admission in IIT. When he went on to open his own startup, he struggled to find funds and investors. He recollects, “The venture guys said you’re looking for too much money.” But now, ReNew Power venture is a leading one in the renewable sector not only in India but around the world as well!
VI. Hike Messenger

Valuation: $1.4
Founding Date: 12th December 2012
Industry: Social
Founder: Kavin Bharti Mittal
Success Story: Kavin Bharti Mittal resorted on a mission- a mission to bring India online. With tons of already famous Messenger apps existing (Facebook Messenger, Orkut, BBM, WhatsApp), Hike faced a unique challenge of the fierce competition. Clearly, they had to offer something that these already famous messengers didn’t. That’s when they came up with a strategy- target the youth. In 2012, it was launched in 100 countries, and that is a particularly huge achievement in itself for a start up! In 2013, it was the #1 rated app on Google Play Store. To give their messenger an edge they launched ‘stickers’. Another feature that worked for them well was giving an option of sending a free SMS to a non-hike user as well.
VII. Shopclues.com

Valuation: $1.1
Founding Date: 2011
Industry: E-commerce
Founder: Sanjay Sethi
Success Story: Shopclues started back in 2011 with a small team of 11 people only! They faced A LOT of challenges in the beginning. For instance, Radhika Aggarwal the CBO says, “When I look back, I think there are multiple places where we could have tripped and fallen, but we didn’t. I am very proud of the way the company has shaped. Some of our early employees have taken up responsibilities beyond their years and it’s good to see them do so well.” Thus, this success story certainly gives out a clear simple message- Keep going!
VIII. Zomato Media

Valuation: $1
Founding Date: July 2008
Industry: Social
Founder: Deepinder Goyal, Pankaj Chaddah
Success Story: Talking about unicorn startups, one can JUST not miss out mentioning this one! Zomato has become the youth’s go-to place when it comes to picking our food outlets. It all started when Deepinder and Pankaj saw their fellow colleagues waiting in huge queues, wasting time scanning the menu at Bain & Co’s. They came up with ‘foodiebay’ and uploaded a scanned copy of the menu on their company’s private network. Yes, that’s what sparked the idea and then there was no looking back. It was only in 2012 that Foodiebay became Zomato. Today it’s the ultimate go-to website and app for everything related to food and restaurants!
IX. Quikr

Valuation: $1
Founding Date: 2008
Industry: E-Commerce
Founder: Pranay Chulet
Success Story: All the unicorn startups on this list is here because they’ve managed to give India something unique, something different. Quikr definitely rates high on this parameter. Who would have thought selling old stuff and buying second-hand items would become so digitalized, easy and cheap? Well, Quikr made it happen. Let’s dig deeper into its inception- it started as a small startup in Mumbai and is now spread over 900 countries. Pranay was working in New York and noticed how people there engaged a lot with digital ads for buying and selling, he wanted to bring the same idea to India. In his words, Quikr was a “revolution waiting to happen”. Taking a step further, they’ve recently launched a missed call facility where the user can give a missed call to their number and an executive calls back and assists with buying and selling.
X. InMobi

Valuation: $1
Founding Date: 2006
Industry: AdTech
Founder: Naveen Tiwari
Success Story: “Over the period of years, we started to see success. We decided to go broader and into different markets and not just stick only to Asia. That’s how we expanded”, that’s how Naveen describes his journey with InMobi. He was a graduate of Harvard Business School who wanted to open something of his own. They started with just being an e- payment platform and slowly expanded into other ventures like advertising too. Their diversity and quality of service are what really worked in their favor.
Bottom line:
Well, the success stories of all these unicorn startups have certainly made us believe that with a sparkling idea and a brimming passion, almost anything can happen. Like we said above, uniqueness and crazy is what runs the world, what now may seem like a trivial idea can actually have a bandwagon effect and can take the world by a storm. So, hey, even you can make it big, just believe in yourself and your strength to overcome challenges. After a hurricane, there’s always a rainbow! It was never an easy ride for any of the above-mentioned unicorn startups, but they made it this far only with their fierce confidence and routing determination.
Here’s hoping that India witnesses many more additions to this list of billion-dollar startups in the near future. Here’s to believing!
You might also want to read and find out the flip side of such stories, i.e reasons as to why a startup fails? Not every startup makes it to the unicorn startup list. To make sure that your startup isn’t at risk, hop on to our recent article on ‘Why do startups fail?’
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