START-UP RICHES

A new generation of techpreneurs is building new-age solutions and creating companies valued at well over a billion dollars, helped by massive investor funding.

- ASMITA DEY

“WE STARTED out in 2010 before the start-up world really kicked in. That was a time when there weren’t too many venture capitalists. We were also starting on the back of a financial crisis… it was almost impossible to raise any capital,” recounts Nithin Kamath, who later went on to build India’s largest tech-powered brokerage firm — in terms of active retail clients — Zerodha, along with co-founder brother Nikhil. Valued at $2 billion today, the start-up has earned itself the rare credit of being a profitable unicorn, with no external funding.

Be it the Kamath Brothers who banked on their astute sense of business to create a formidable play in the trading industry or Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma who cashed in on the unseen opportunities presented by demonetisation to build a fintech behemoth, start-up founders have disrupted the market time and again, and garnered investor backing for a fledgling sector. “When I raised my first round from Sequoia in 2005, our pre-money valuation was $2.5 million. Today, the pre-money valuation of start-ups stands at $10-15 million. The size of the market is changing and start-ups are getting much more traction,” says edtech unicorn Emeritus’ co-founder and CEO Ashwin Damera.