India’s start-up generation

In the 2000s most ambitious Indian engineers aimed for a job at an IT company or in Silicon Valley. By the 2010s many were starting companies of their own. India now has one of the world’s largest start-up ecosystems. Here are the founders and builders who shaped it.

The digital foundations

Much of India’s start-up boom rests on public digital infrastructure. Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys, led the creation of Aadhaar, the biometric identity system, and was a key figure behind the UPI payment network. Cheap mobile data, which grew rapidly after Reliance Jio launched in 2016, brought hundreds of millions of people online.

E-commerce: Flipkart

In 2007, two IIT Delhi graduates, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, started Flipkart as an online bookstore. They adapted e-commerce to India with cash on delivery and their own delivery network. In 2018 Walmart bought a majority stake for about 16 billion dollars, then the world’s largest e-commerce deal.

Payments: Paytm

Vijay Shekhar Sharma launched Paytm in 2010 as a mobile recharge site. When high-value banknotes were withdrawn in November 2016, millions of shopkeepers began accepting payments through Paytm’s QR codes, and digital payments entered daily life across India.

Investing: Zerodha

Nithin Kamath and his brother Nikhil founded Zerodha in 2010, charging low flat fees for trading shares. It grew without venture capital to become one of India’s largest stockbrokers and helped bring millions of young Indians into the stock market.

Hotels and beauty: OYO and Nykaa

Ritesh Agarwal started what became OYO as a teenager, standardising budget hotels across India and beyond. Falguni Nayar left a successful banking career at 50 to found the beauty retailer Nykaa, whose 2021 listing made her one of India’s richest self-made women.

Indians leading global tech

Indian-born executives also lead some of the world’s largest technology companies, including Sundar Pichai at Google, Satya Nadella at Microsoft and Shantanu Narayen at Adobe — a sign of how far Indian technical talent now reaches.

Lessons from the boom

The start-up story has had failures as well as successes: valuations rose and fell, and some companies faced regulatory problems. But it has changed Indian attitudes to risk and entrepreneurship. Starting a company is now a respectable career choice for young Indians, not just a gamble.