The latest unicorns stories from the Startups desk.
n a watershed moment for the nation's technology narrative, Indian AI startups have collectively attracted $50 billion in global investment — a milestone that cements India's position as the world's third-largest AI innovation hub.
Square Yards was founded in 2014. The last equity round before this one was in 2019. The company spent seven years building profitability, assembling a full real estate value chain platform, and growing revenue at a 51% four-year CAGR — before asking for its first billion. That discipline is the most important thing about this unicorn story. The ₹900 crore is the consequence. The decade of building is the cause.
India had fewer than 60,000 GPUs deployed when Neysa raised $1.2 billion in February 2026. The country needs 2 million to realise its AI ambition — a 30x increase that requires sovereign infrastructure, not just hyperscaler access. Sharad Sanghi built Netmagic, sold it, and came back to build the compute layer India needs. Blackstone holds a majority stake.
India has added four new unicorns in 2026 — Skyroot Aerospace (first space-tech unicorn, $1.1B), Sarvam AI ($1.5B), KreditBee, Neysa, and Juspay — taking the total to 131. The billion-dollar club is no longer an anomaly
Nithin Kamath was 17 years old when he lost everything. He had been trading stocks with money saved from odd jobs—a few thousand rupees, painstakingly accumulated—and in a single session, the market took it all. The loss was not a setback. It was an education. Most teenagers who blow their savings on the stock market either quit trading or spend years chasing their losses. Kamath did neither. He studied what went wrong. He learned about risk management, position sizing, and the psychological discipline that separates traders from gamblers. He rebuilt his capital, trade by trade, and by the time he was in his early twenties, he was managing money for other people. The boy who lost everything at 17 would eventually become the co-founder of Zerodha, India's largest stockbroker—a company that has never raised a rupee of venture capital, has been profitable since inception, and now generates annual revenue exceeding ₹8,500 crore with a profit approaching ₹5,000 crore.