Dinesh Agarwal, Founder and CEO, IndiaMart, believes that digitisation and significant capital investments in the last two decades have contributed towards the exponential rise of the Indian startup ecosystem

The Economic Survey 2021-22, released last month, showed that India had become the world’s third largest-startup ecosystem after the US and China. It notes that the government in that past year recognised over 14,000 new startups compared to 733 in 2016-17. Moreover, India saw a record 44 startups turning unicorns in 2021 and just two months into the new year, India has already registered ten unicorns. What explains this exponential growth of India’s startup ecosystem?

Dinesh Agarwal, Founder and CEO, India Mart, says that digitisation and significant capital investments in the last two decades have resulted in this dramatic growth of the Indian startup ecosystem.

“Twenty years ago, the whole venture capital or private equity capital or risk capital which doesn’t come with a debt mindset was not available. The whole concept of valuation and exits was probably not there. So, people were building the slow growth model of cash flow-based business approval. Secondly, the number of internet users jumped significantly due to the IT penetration, and in accordance with that, the number of mobile users went up. This gave a lot of opportunities to write software and start businesses. These two, I believe, have propelled the whole startup ecosystem in India to a great extent,” says Aggarwal.

Watch the complete video here to listen to Aggarwal elaborating on the digitisation aspect, what it means to be an entrepreneur, why people aspire to become an entrepreneur and whether founders should have a ‘Plan B?’

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