Top 10 successfull startups of India

"Each and every persons have their own desires , but only few turns desire to imagination and imagination  to planning and then worked hard for their success and created the history"

India is presently witnessing a significant growth in startup system. These Startups are making human life more and more comfortable. Their inspired stories have paved the roads for upcoming entrepreneurs and also motivated many young people.

 List below are the top 10 successful startups which created a history.

1. Sachin Bansal, Flipkart

Sachin Bansal started Flipkart in 2007 from a one-room apartment in Bangalore along with his schoolmate Binny Bansal. The store started by selling books online and later expanded to categories such as apparel and electronics.

Now valued at over US$17 billion, Flipkart is amongst the top 10 ecommerce companies in the world. Earlier an employee at Amazon India, Sachin is now amongst the wealthiest internet millionaires in India. He relegated the CEO role to Binny, this week.

Flipkart data

Funding amount: US$3.2 billion
Key Investors: Tiger Global, Accel Partners, Naspers, DST Global, Iconiq Capital, Greenoaks Capital, Steadview Capital, GIC, Investment Authority, Morgan Stanley, Sofina, T. Rowe Price Associates, etc.

Latest funding stage: Series H
Industry: Ecommerce

2. Kunal Bahl, Snapdeal

(Second from left in specs) Kunal Bahl, cofounder and CEO of Snapdeal, with cofounder Rohit Bansal (third from left) and Softbank founder Masayoshi Son (extreme right).

After being denied extension of his work visa in the US, Kunal Bahl, a former employee at Microsoft, returned to India in 2008. Along with his schoolmate Rohit Bansal, Kunal experimented with various businesses over the course of four years before setting up Snapdeal as a discount coupons and daily deals site.

Seeing the success of Flipkart in India, Kunal pivoted Snapdeal to conventional ecommerce in 2012, and business picked up from there.

Kunal is known in India as the master of pivots, having successfully changed multiple business models in the past five years.

Snapdeal data

Funding amount: US$1.53 billion
Key Investors: SoftBank Corp, Ru-Net Holdings, Tybourne, PremjiInvest, Temasek, Bessemer Venture Partners, IndoUS Ventures, Kalaari Capital, Saama Capital, Nexus Ventures, Ratan Tata, etc.
Latest funding stage: Series I
Industry: Ecommerce

3. Bhavish Aggarwal, Ola

Photo Credit: Crunchbase

Co-founded in 2010 by tech graduate Bhavish Aggarwal, Ola Cabs is the biggest online taxi and car aggregator in India today, strongly rivalling Uber.

The transportation startup was founded in Mumbai and raised angel funds from Snapdeal co-founder Kunal Bahl and Shaadi founder Anupam Mittal. Valued at over US$5 billion now, Ola has about 250,000 cabs and auto rickshaws in its app, operational in about 85 Indian cities.

Ola data

Funding amount: US$1.17 billion
Key Investors: SoftBank, Didi Kuaidi, Tiger Global, DST Global, Matrix Partners and Sequoia Capital
Latest funding stage: Series F
Industry: Transportation, logistics

4. Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Paytm

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of Paytm

Born in a small town near Delhi, Vijay Shekhar Sharma was the first amongst his immediate family to graduate from a tech school and then travel overseas for a job. Vijay launched One97 as a telecoms software company in the early 2000s and later pivoted it to Paytm, an online marketplace in 2009.

Paytm is now widely used for payments and mobile credit top-ups. The company last year raised about US$700 million in capital from Ant Financial, the affiliate epayments division of Chinese ecommerce powerhouse Alibaba.

Paytm data

Funding amount: US$935 million
Key Investors: Ant Financial Services (Alibaba), SAIF Partners.
Latest funding stage: Series K
Industry: Online payments, ecommerce

5. Pranay Chulet, Quikr

(In centre – in brown jacket) Quikr CEO and founder Pranay Chulet , riding the bike with CommonFloor cofounders. Quikr acquired CommonFloor, in January.

Hailing from Rajasthan, Pranay Chulet is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.

After working in consulting firms such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and Booz Allen Hamilton, Chulet started Quikr. It’s now one of India’s largest online classifieds portals, the only bigger rival being the Indian version of OLX.

In 2007, Pranay started his first entrepreneurial venture, Excellere. In 2008, he founded Kijiji India, which was later rebranded as Quikr.

Pranay is known amongst startup circles as one of the most passionate movie buffs, and on weekends you can catch him watching the latest flick at home or at the cinema.

Quikr data

Funding amount: US$350 million
Key Investors: Warburg Pincus, Omidyar Network, and AB Kinnevik.
Latest funding stage: Series H
Industry: Classifieds

6. Naveen Tewari, InMobi

Naveen Tewari, cofounder and CEO of InMobi, a mobile ad network company.

Naveen Tewari is the founder and CEO of InMobi, a global mobile advertising platform.

Hailing from a family of professors, Naveen Tewari continued his lineage
and completed his tech studies at the Indian Institute of Technology in 2000. Here he met his future co-founders Amit Gupta and Abhay Singhal. The trio later formed Mkhoj in 2007, an SMS-based search engine. The company tanked and Naveen recalls in his blog running the company bills on credit cards.

That first startup pivoted to become mobile ad platform InMobi, which got funded with US$200 million from Softbank, the largest such funding in the mobile ad space in the world up to 2011. It was also the largest VC funding ever in India at the time.

InMobi data

Funding amount: US$315 million
Key Investors: SoftBank, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Latest funding stage: Undisclosed
Industry: Online ad networks

7. Deepinder Goyal, Zomato

Deepinder Goyal, cofounder and CEO of Zomato, an online restaurant discovery application.

After collecting and pinning menus on his office soft board at Bain & Co, Deepinder Goyal decided to give his hobby a digital push by scanning the menus on a website for everyone to see. The site became popular. Deepinder and his colleague at Bain, Pankaj Chaddah, decided to pursue it commercially.

In 2008, they hired a CEO for their venture. After 18 months, the duo decided to quit their jobs and live the startup life full-time.

The website soon listed 1,200 restaurants in New Delhi – and the team hasn’t looked back since. It has expanded to over 22 countries.

However, as typical Indian parents, Deepinder’s parents advised him to shut it down and go back to a proper job. He did not listen. The company is now valued at close to US$1 billion.

Zomato data

Funding amount: US$223 million
Key Investors: Info Edge, Temasek, Sequoia Capital and Vy Capital.
Latest funding stage: Series G
Industry: Search

8. Ritesh Aggarwal, OyoRooms

Ritesh Agarwal, CEO of Oyo Rooms, a budget rooms aggregator portal.

At 21 years of age, Ritesh Aggarwal is India’s youngest millionaire entrepreneur, having created budget hotel startup OyoRooms.

Ironically, Ritesh was thrown out of rented place in New Delhi when he couldn’t pay the rent. He slept the night in the stairway.

Ritesh had come to Delhi to study in college. But after just three days he realized that formal education is not something he wants to waste his time on. He dropped out and started a bed-and-breakfast chain called Oravel Stays, which later pivoted to become OyoRooms.

When his parents got to know their son had dropped out, they became angry. “My mother said who will give a daughter to my son for marriage now,” says Ritesh.

OyoRooms data

Funding amount: US$130 million
Key Investors: SoftBank, Lightspeed, and Sequoia Capital.
Latest funding stage: Series C
Industry: Ecommerce, travel

9. VSS Mani, JustDial

VSS Mani, founder and CEO of Just Dial, India’s largest local business search engine. Photo Credit: EPLIndia.org

Founded in 1996 by VSS Mani, Mumbai-based Just Dial is now a household name. It offers classifieds listings of small businesses for an annual fee. People can can search for businesses via phone, SMS, the website, or now through the mobile app.

The company was started in Mumbai with a few pieces of borrowed furniture, rented computers, and a 15-square-foot garage which he took on hire. It had seed capital of INR 50,000 (about US$750).

Now the company is one of the few such businesses in India to go for an IPO. The company is listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange with a valuation of just under US$1 billion. It now has over 15 million listings and employs about 9,000 people.

JustDial data

Funding amount: US$103.2 million
Key Investors: SAIF Partners, Tiger Global, SAP Ventures, Public shareholders.
Latest funding stage: IPO
Industry: Search

10. Kavin Bharti Mittal, Hike

Kavin Bharti Mittal, Founder & CEO, Hike, an internet messaging application.

Delhi-based Kavin Bharti Mittal, scion of the huge Bharti Group, faces a peculiar problem. Every week his prepaid account runs out of data due to heavy internet usage. Kavin purposefully chooses to keep a prepaid number on a low-end smartphone in order to identify problems faced by India’s 950 million mobile users, 95 percent of whom are on pay-as-you go packages.

To solve such bottlenecks, Kavin plans to transform Hike into an all-encompassing mobile app where people could buy groceries, book a cab, or order food. Hike has also introduced a feature where its messaging works on phones without internet.

Hikes aims to beat Whatsapp, the most popular messaging app in India, at present.

Hike data

Funding amount: US$86 million
Key Investors: Tiger Global Management and Bharti SoftBank.
Latest funding stage: Series C
Industry: Social networking