Indian founders create $560 bn in overseas unicorn value: Report | India Business News

Of the 205 overseas companies, 70 were built entirely by founders who grew up in India. These businesses account for $243 billion and include Zscaler, Rubrik, Nutanix, Icertis and Skild

Bengaluru: Indian founders have co-founded more than twice as many billion-dollar companies abroad as they have in India, according to new data.The findings are part of the Indian Diaspora Index, compiled by technology investor Prosus and startup data platform Dealroom. The study identified 205 current and former unicorns overseas, compared with 101 in India.Together, the overseas companies are valued at about $1.1 trillion. However, the report attributes $560 billion of this value to founders who grew up in India. The comparable figure for the 101 companies built in India is $349 billion.The report uses a methodology to avoid attributing a company’s entire value to an Indian founder when there are multiple co-founders. It divides a company’s value equally among its founders and counts only the share attributed to founders who grew up in India.For instance, Perplexity is valued at $20 billion and has four founders. As one of them, Aravind Srinivas, grew up in India, the study attributes $5 billion of the company’s value to the Indian diaspora.This calculation does not indicate how much of a company a founder actually owns. Nor does it represent the founder’s personal wealth or the amount of capital flowing back to India.Of the 205 overseas companies, 70 were built entirely by founders who grew up in India. These companies account for $243 billion and include Zscaler, Rubrik, Nutanix, Icertis and Skild.The remaining 135 companies have mixed founding teams. The portions attributed to their India-raised founders add up to $317 billion. These companies include Palo Alto Networks, Bloom Energy, Astera Labs, Rippling and Perplexity.The US is home to 187 of the 205 overseas companies. Another 18 companies in the dataset were initially founded in India and subsequently moved overseas. These include Icertis, Postman, Freshworks, BrowserStack and Chargebee.Within India, Flipkart leads the report’s valuation list at $36 billion, followed by Zomato at about $29.5 billion, Lenskart at $16.3 billion and Groww at $16.2 billion.The data also highlights the expansion of India’s domestic startup ecosystem. The value attributed to India-built companies rose from $1.5 billion in 2010 to $349 billion in 2026, a 226-fold increase. The corresponding figure for overseas companies rose 64 times, from $8.7 billion to $560 billion.Despite the growth in both ecosystems, the gap has widened in recent years. The difference between the two groups increased from about $51 billion in 2022 to $211 billion in 2026.“What has changed in this period is that founders no longer have to leave to build at scale. The market, the capital and the operating talent are now here,” said Saurav Jain, principal investor at Prosus India.