An Entrepreneur wants to see his/her startup enter the lofty billion-dollar unicorn club one day. Nonetheless, turning into a ‘unicorn’ in the midst of the pandemic is hard to acknowledge for some startups, owing to the many setbacks, especially business slowdown. Startups including Nykaa, Unacademy, Zerodha, Razorpay, and Postman achieved unicorn status in the midst of the pandemic.
Seven Indian Startups that entered the Unicorn Club in 2020
Here are the seven Indian new startups that entered the billion-dollar club in 2020.
Razorpay
Founded in 2014 by Shashank Mathur and Harshil Mathur, Razorpay is a platform that enables businesses to accept, process, and disburse payments with its product suite. Payment Solution provider Razorpay turned into India’s 6th unicorn this year after it raised $100 million (about Rs 731 crore) in a financing round co-led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and Sequoia Capital India. Razorpay assists organizations with modernizing their monetary framework by providing intelligent automated payment and banking solutions to manage their entire cash flow. It presently powers payments for more than 5 million organizations including Airtel, BookMyShow, Facebook, Ola, Zomato, Swiggy, Cred, ICICI Prudential among others and intends to twofold this to 10 million by the end of this year.
Zerodha
Bangalore based startup Zerodha was founded by Nitin Kamath and Nikhil Kamath in 2010. The startup is an Indian financial service organization that offers retail and institutional broking, currencies and commodities trading, mutual funds, and bonds. The fintech organization Zerodha has a current valuation of $3 billion. GoldenPi, an exchanging stage, raised Rs 3.5 crore from the Bengaluru-based organization in June this year, through Rainmatter capital. Nithin Kamath and Nikhil Kamath, the founders of Zerodha, are the newcomers in the recently-released Forbes’ list of India’s 100 richest 2020.
Postman
Launched in 2015 by Abhinav Asthana, Ankit Sobti, and Abhijit Kane, Postman essentially exists as a platform that developers can download. The platform helps developers build, test, document, and share their APIs at a faster pace. The startup had raised $150 million in a Series C speculation round led by Insight Partners, worldwide investment and private value firm in June. Utilized by more than 500,000 organizations worldwide, the Postman API Platform encourages them to quicken their movement and effectiveness of software development.
Unacademy
Unacademy was founded in the year 2015 by Gaurav Munjal, Hemesh Singh, and Roman Saini. Their primary focus is the educators creating educational videos and offering live interactive classes to students, and students having access to more than 30 exam preparing categories. The edtech firm a month ago raised around Rs 1,125 crore in a subsidizing round led by Softbank Vision Fund 2 along with cooperation from existing financial investors including Facebook. The organization had raised around Rs 780 crore in February in a funding round led by social media major Facebook and General Atlantic. Unacademy has a network of more than 18,000 teachers and 350,000 paid subscribers.
Nykaa
Nykaa, a fashion startup was founded in 2012 by Falguni Nayar. It was valued at $1.2 billion in April. It had raised about Rs 100 crore in subsidizing from its current financial specialist UK-based Steadview Capital as an essential venture, in April this year. The Mumbai-based cosmetic retailer had downsized activities during Covid lockdown.
Pine Labs
Established in 1998 by Lokvir Kapoor, Rajul Garg, and Tarun Upaday, Noida-based startup Pine Labs provides a merchant platform and makes software for point of sale (PoS) machines. Pine Labs processes payments of $30 billion every year and serves near 140,000 merchants across 450,000 network points. The funding round was pegged at $100-$150 million (Rs 713-1,069 crore), as indicated by sources. With this, the Sequoia Capital-supported Pine Labs is currently esteemed at $1.5-1.6 billion.
FirstCry
Established in 2010 by Supam Maheshwari and Amitava Saha, FirstCry has been an undisputed pioneer in the omnichannel child and mother care products segment. The startup professes to offer two lakh baby products across 2,000 brands and has expanded its client base to more than 4,000,000. It has a retail impression of more than 300 stores spread across 125 urban communities.
Pune-based baby products marketplace Firstcry raised $296 million (Rs 2,120 crore) in a Series E funding round from Japan-based Softbank’s Vision Fund in February of this year. As indicated by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings, the venture is the main tranche of the total $400 million funding, which has been committed by SoftBank. The extra Rs 703 crore ($100 million) has been reserved by SoftBank to be invested on the second anniversary of the transaction in January 2021.
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