Inspiring India — The Unicorn Way

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The recent pandemic has endorsed India’s capability to rise to the challenge. India saw 11 unicorns emerge during 2020. In fact, 2021 has already seen three startups enter the unicorn club.

We currently stand fourth in the world for the most number of unicorns, behind US, China and UK.

However, India’s 44 firms bring much more than fat valuations to the table. The social contract is inherent to the idea of enterprise at these unicorns. Besides adding USD 106B and 1.4 million jobs to the economy, Indian unicorns are implementing solutions that India desperately needs to uplift its vast poor population.

Given India’s globally acclaimed technology prowess, it is no wonder that most of India’s unicorns are in the fin-tech space. However,  the diversity is now actively at play and the unicorn arena encompasses all business verticals.

At the same time, Indian unicorns are going vernacular to reach out to more than 100 crore regional language speaking people at the grassroot level. Byju’s, Zomato, Oyo, inMobi and Policybazaar all support between two and 12 regional languages.

Many of these unicorns are also aggregators and the core of their business model is corporatising informal business.

India is essentially an informal economy and our aggregation model unicorns have already demonstrated the will to corporatise our unorganised sectors.

One key aspect which often gets lost in the glory is that our unicorns are bringing financial inclusion solutions and spreading financial empowerment in  most remote corners of the country.

Moreover, more Indian unicorns perfectly couples India’s young, dynamic population. With 65% of the population under the age of 35, the unicorns have an opportunity to leverage the demographic dividend.

But it is not only about the number of ‘zeros’ that these startups record on their balance sheets.

Rather, it is about Indian unicorns getting established for the purpose of improving the lives of millions of citizens yet not covered by the entrepreneurial dividend.

It’s all about enabling financial inclusion of 130 crore citizens of India.

To my mind, the true achievement of India’s unicorns is about how they are inspiring and empowering people across the country.  India needs an ever growing unicorn club to manifest its multitude of aspirations. What if India targets to have 1,000 unicorns  by 2025? Imagine how close that will take us to PM’s dream of USD 5 trillion economy.

Given our network’s exponential growth in the language market and the undisputed leadership in the TV news genre, we wish to showcase the unicorn story as one that not just reaches out to the grassroots, but improves quality of lives and enables an inclusive growth.

Money9, India’s first multi-lingual Personal Finance platform, along with all our digital media assets will showcase the inspirational story of our unicorns. Our broadcast services will also come into play to amplify the message.

Watch out for Inspiring India – The Unicorn Way initiative to record their best practices. Join the initiative to inspire India in ways more than one….

(The writer is CEO, TV9 Network)