Strebulev, professor of finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, found that 90 of the 1,078 founders of 500 American unicorns (each valued at over $1 billion) were born in India. Strebulaev’s data includes American unicorns between 1997 and 2019. “More than 4 out of 10 unicorn founders are first generation immigrants,” he tweeted. Israel and Canada followed with 52 and 42 respectively.
Prominent among the Indian founders of unicorns – past and present – is Baiju Bhatt of Robinhood, the commission-free stock trading app, Rohan Seth of Clubhouse, Apoorva Mehta of Instacart, Dheeraj Pandey, Mohit Aaron and Ajit Singh of Nutanix, Arun Murthy and Suresh Srinivas of Hortonworks, Aayush Phumbhra of Chegg, Gagan Biyani of Udemy, and Dhiraj Rajaram of Mu Sigma.
Fractal Analytics, which became Unicorn this year, was founded by Nirmal Palparthi, Pradeep Suryanarayan, Pranay Agarwal, Ramakrishna Reddy and. Srikanth Velamkanni In California, however, like Mu Sigma, most of its deliveries take place outside India.
Last year, Mohandas Pai’s investment firm 3One4 Capital estimated that 67 of the 288 American unicorns at the time had at least one Indian-origin founder. America has a history of highly successful Indian-origin entrepreneurs including Kanwal Rekhi, Pramod Haque, Kumar Malavalli. Sanjay Malhotra, Gururaj Deshpande, B.V. Jagdish, and Sabeer Bhatia, Many of them may not have created enterprises worth more than $1 billion at the time, but were in fact the “unicorns” of the time.
Four years ago, the US-based Kaufman Foundation estimated that 33.2% of co-founders of engineering and technology firms founded by immigrants in the US since 2006 were Indians. The next high were the Chinese at 8.1%. Another study conducted in 2007 for the period 1995 to 2005 found that the share of Indians in co-founders during that period was 26%. The Kaufman Foundation found that only the contribution of Indian immigrants had increased.
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