As a tech journalist in Bengaluru, I spent much of the early 2010s writing about Indian startups raising money from Silicon Valley investors.
Every other month, I would find myself looking up a new American venture capital firm that was leading a multimillion-dollar funding round in a startup in Bengaluru or Delhi.
At the time, American VC firms were entering India to place early bets on a country whose startup ecosystem was still in its infancy. India did not yet have a mature risk-capital culture. Most local wealth stayed parked in real estate, gold, or public markets. Investing in young founders with little revenue and ambitious ideas felt foreign.
But those early bets paid off spectacularly.
VCs who invested in companies like Flipkart and Ola — once small teams trying to build Indian versions of Amazon and Uber — earned returns in multiples. For instance, Tiger Global reportedly made roughly $3.5 billion from its Flipkart investment after Walmart acquired the company in 2018 in the world’s largest e-commerce deal at the time.
