With total of 90, Indians top list of US unicorns' immigrant
- IBEF
- January 17, 2022
Not only in India, but also in the United States, Indians are creating unicorns.
According to a study conducted by Ilya A Strebulaev, a finance professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, 90 of the 1,078 founders of 500 US unicorns were born in India. Between 1997 and 2019, Strebulaev's data covers unicorns in the United States. "Over four out of ten unicorn founders are first-generation immigrants," he tweeted. With 52 and 42 founders, respectively, Israel and Canada came in second and third.
Among Indian founders of prominent unicorns – past and present – are Baiju Bhatt of Robinhood, the commission-free stock trading app, 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, Dhiraj Rajaram of Mu Sigma. Fractal Analytics, which turned a unicorn this year, was founded by Nirmal Palaparthi, Pradeep Suryanarayan, Pranay Agrawal and Ramakrishna Reddy.
Last year, Mohandas Pai's investment firm 3One4 Capital estimated that at least one Indian-origin founder was involved in 67 of the 288 American unicorns at the time.
Kanwal Rekhi, Pramod Haque, Kumar Malvalli, Sanjay Malhotra, Gururaj Deshpande, B V Jagadeesh, and Sabeer Bhatia are only a few examples of exceptionally successful Indian-origin entrepreneurs in America. Many of them may not have launched projects worth more than US$ 1 billion at the time, but there were "unicorns" back then.
The Kauffman Foundation in the United States reported four years ago that Indians made up 33.2% of the co-founders of engineering and technology enterprises created by immigrants in the United States since 2006. The Chinese came in second with 8.1%.
Another study published in 2007 found that Indians made up 26% of co-founders between 1995 and 2005. According to the Kauffman Foundation, the contribution of Indian immigrants was the only one that rose; most other immigrant populations saw their contributions fall, resulting in a general stagnation in immigrant entrepreneurship in the United States.
Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.
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