Of Unicorns.

Honestly, I did not know what the hell Unicorns and Decacorns were until last year or may be a year before that. It is not really important when I exactly became aware of this term of honour in the start-up scene.

A Unicorn is a start-up company in the tech sector that is valued at billion dollars (US) or more. And a decacorn is that start-up in the tech sector which is valued at ten billion dollars or more. Well, the valuation part is a little complicated. It is not necessary that the said Unicorn is making any money or not; it may as well be bleeding with losses. The funding that a start-up receives depends solely up on its potential future earnings as seen by its investors.

So, in many ways, many of these companies are no more than unique ideas with some rented office space and hip looking founders usually in their early twenties. For example, before I subscribed to Youtube Premium, I used to be inundated with these ‘CRED’ adverts featuring various forgotten Bollywood stars.

Today, I learned that this same credit card payment app CRED is valued at more than a billion dollars, even though it cannot make money even if Kunal Shah’s life depended on it. Well, this Kunal Shah is the founder of this start-up. I mean, what do i know of start-ups and business shit, but something does not add up.

Not every one of these Unicorns and Decacorn are going to end up as legitimate self-sustaining businesses, but lot of them could also succeed. And yeah, CRED can also succeed because it has lot of data about the credit card spending patterns of its users. I assume that it has. I guess that is valuable? What do i know?

Swiggy raised additional funding recently. Its competitor Zomato is also a fellow billion dollar plus startup and is fairly popular.

If my memory serves me right, there are currently a total of 47 Unicorns functioning in India. India is a country with the third largest number of Unicorns and Decacorns.

So, why is that?

I have got some reasons which are as follows:

1. Well, there is lot of cheap money available and Global investors, venture capitalists see a lot growth potential in the world’s largest democracy that is still young and touted to be a future third biggest economy.
2. Many young people in India are not interested in jobs, and there is a massive energetic entrepreneurial energy flowing through these young lads. They, basically, don’t want to work under anyone.
3. Cheap internet by Reliance JIO followed by other Telecom players.
4. And, resultantly, more smartphones usage.

So, it’s not really that unbelievable, but in this pandemic stricken times, it is a good thought to have that at least something is going right here. It is estimated that India could have as many as 150 unicorns by 2025. Lets hope some among them turn out to be India’s Alibaba, Facebook or Amazon.