Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, who played a pivotal role in building India’s digital public infrastructure such as Aadhaar and UPI, expects the number of startups in India to grow 20% every year to reach one million in the next ten years.
Currently, there are around 150,000 startups in India but the number is set to rise as employees of larger startups branch out to start their own ventures. E-commerce giant Flipkart is a leading example of this trend, with former employees creating 44 startups as of February last year, with a total valuation of $25 billion.
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So far, around 100 unicorns have created close to 2,000 funded startups. “A form of binary fission is happening, startups are leading to more startups,” he noted. Nilekani was speaking at an event by Arkam Ventures, where he outlined the key measures India can take to increase its growth rate from 6% to 8% and achieve an $8-trillion economy by 2035.
As startups scale and tap the public market for capital, Nilekani expects India to become the most preferred IPO market globally by 2035. At present, India is the second largest IPO market, trailing US. In 2024, India’s IPO market had a record haul of $20.5 billion.
This has been possible thanks to the dramatic growth in retail investor participation over the last few years. We have around 100 million unique equity investors, he added. As per data from the recent Economic Survey, monthly average gross SIP flows have more than doubled in the last three years, to Rs 23,000 crore in FY25.
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Besides the expected growth in startups, Nilekani also highlighted the need for India to build open-source AI models for various Indian languages and dialects. The aim is to build population-scale, low-cost, and high-volume infrastructure, just like the current digital public infrastructure (DPI).
This, along with a wider network coverage and cheaper smartphones, will help propel the number of UPI users from less than 500 million to 1 billion over the next ten years, he added.
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