Tech startups raise $7 billion, lowest in 5 years

BENGALURU: The funding winter in India’s startup ecosystem is far from over. Indian tech startups raised $7 billion this year, its lowest in the last five years. This is a sharp drop of 72% as against $25 billion it raised in the corresponding period last year, showed data from market intelligenceplatform Tracxn’s Geo Annual Report: India Tech 2023.Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi-NCR are the top-funded cities in India so far.
With $7 billion in funding so far, the report said India dropped to the fifth spot from the fourth, in terms of the highest-funded geographies globally this year. The December quarter (Q4) recorded the lowest funding of $957 million to date, marking it the lowest-funded quarter since the September quarter of 2016.
The decline is primarily due to the sharpest drop in late-stage funding — by over 73% to $4.2 billion in 2023 from $15.6 billion in 2022. The number of $100 million rounds were only 17, dropping by 69% compared to last year. Fintechs received $2.1 billion in funding this year, a decrease from $5.8 billion from the corresponding period last year. PhonePe, for instance, secured a total of $750 million which made up for 38% of the funding received by the sector. Perfios, Insurancedekho, and Kreditbee, are some of the other top-funded companies in the sector this year.
LetsVenture, Accel and Blume Ventures have topped the list of most active investors in 2023 to date. Two new unicorns were created; Incred and Zepto as against 23 in the previous year. However, the number of IPOs dropped to18 tech companies going public in 2023 till date as compared to 19 in 2022. Ideaforge and Mamaearth went public this year.