Indians are creating unicorns not just in India, but in the US too. A study finds that 90 out of 1,078 founders across 500 US unicorns (valued at over $1 billion each) were born in India. The data covers US unicorns between 1997 and 2019. According to the study, “over 4 out of 10 unicorn founders are first gen immigrants. Israel and Canada followed with 52 and 42 respectively.
Among Indian founders of prominent unicorns are Baiju Bhatt of Robinhood, Rohan Seth of Clubhouse, Apoorva Mehta of Instacart, Dheeraj Pandey, Mohit Aron and Ajeet Singh of Nutanix, Arun Murthy and Suresh Srinivas of Hortonworks, Aayush Phumbhra of Chegg, Gagan Biyani of Udemy, and Dhiraj Rajaram of Mu Sigma.
Fractal Analytics, which turned unicorn this year, was founded by Nirmal Palaparthi, Pradeep Suryanarayan, Pranay Agrawal, Ramakrishna Reddy and Srikanth Velamakanni in California, though, like Mu Sigma, has most of its delivery out of India.
Last year, Mohandas Pai’s investment firm 3One4 Capital estimated that 67 of the 288 American unicorns at that time had at least one Indian-origin founder. The US has a history of extremely successful Indian-origin entrepreneurs including Kanwal Rekhi, Pramod Haque, Kumar Malvalli, Sanjay Malhotra, Gururaj Deshpande, B V Jagadeesh, and Sabeer Bhatia. Many of them may not have built ventures valued at over $1 billion then, but there were indeed the “unicorns” of those times. Four years ago, US-based Kauffman Foundation estimated that 33. 2% of the co-founders of engineering and technology firms founded by immigrants in the US since 2006 were Indians.
