Alumni of IIT Delhi lead list of top startup founders

MUMBAI: About one-third of the 388 founders of India’s 200 most valuable companies that started on or after year 2000 are IITians, says a joint study by Hurun India and IDFC First Bank. IIT Delhi, alma mater to startup poster boys Sachin and Binny Bansal, leads the pack with 36 founders having graduated from there.
Twenty of these entrepreneurs graduated from IIT Bombay and another 19 from IIT Kharagpur. The startups founded by IITians that feature in the list of 200 top companies have a combined valuation of about Rs 20 lakh crore, analysts at Hurun India said. Zomato co-founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal, another alumnus of IIT Delhi, ranks second on the list.

‘1 of 3 top desi self-made entrepreneurs from IITs’b

IITs are churning out a large number of new age entrepreneurs. About a third of the 388 founders from the 200 most valuable companies (founded since the year 2000) are IITians, a joint study published by Hurun India and IDFC First Bank on Wednesday showed. IIT Delhi, alma mater to Indian startup poster boys Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, leads the pack with 36 founders having graduated from the institution. Twenty entrepreneurs graduated from IIT Bombay and another 19 from IIT Kharagpur.

Startups (those in the list of 200 companies) founded by IITians collectively have a combined valuation of about Rs 20 lakh crore, analysts at Hurun India said. Zomato co-founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal, an alumnus of IIT Delhi, who took the Gurgaon-based food and grocery delivery startup public in 2021 in one of the most subscribed public issues of the year, features second on the list of self-made entrepreneurs after DMart’s Radhakishan Damani.
Zomato’smarket cap has surpassed Rs 2.5 lakh crore amid a surge in consumer adoption for digital services. PolicyBazaar led by IIT Delhi alumnus Yashish Dahiya, fintech unicorn Razorpay led by IIT Roorkee alumni Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar have joined the ranks of the top self-made entrepreneurs on the back of the growth of their businesses.
Startups are becoming more mainstream and a growing base of domestic investors and local family offices is fuelling the expansion of the startup ecosystem, encouraging young college graduates to set up new age ventures. Besides, institutions like IITs have been incubating startups, adding to the ecosystem’s growth. The IIT Madras incubation cell, for instance, closed 2023 with a portfolio of 351 deep tech startups with a combined valuation of Rs 45,000 crore.