Behind the Scenes

Evaluating start-ups is more than number crunching. While some factors are quantifiable, many are more nuanced. Here's a sneak peek inside the war room from where the rankings emerged

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Ideas are easy, implementation is hard, writes American author Guy Kawasaki. These words resonated deeply as we embarked on creating a comprehensive ranking system for India's start-ups. The process was akin to assembling a complex mosaic, where each piece, no matter how small, plays a crucial role in revealing the bigger picture.

Over the past few months, we went on an intense journey to ensure our evaluation of start-ups, states and cities is both nuanced and robust.

The first step in the process was honing key sectors for which start-ups were to be evaluated and ranked. Each sector was chosen not just for its current prominence, in terms of the number of start-ups, as well as funding received by the sector, but also for its latency in shaping tomorrow's economy.

While direct-to-consumer (D2C), fintech, enterprise tech, health tech and clean tech were the top sectors selected for evaluation, space tech and defence tech were chosen as watchout sectors in view of their emerging potential in India's start-up ecosystem.

Within each sector, a list of growth-stage start-ups was prepared. Then they were evaluated and ranked. These start-ups were founded in 2010 and after, were in funding stages A and B in 2023-24 and had a latest valuation of $10-800mn.

Evaluation Framework

As LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman famously said, “Starting a company is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.” Our evaluation framework needed to capture this inherent complexity of start-up building and therefore we structured our analysis around three fundamental pillars: financial performance, funding and valuation, and operational capabilities—each representing a critical aspect of start-up success.