# Startup Talk

> Startup Talk tells the stories behind the world's best-known startups, country by country: who started them, where the founders came from, how the companies were funded, the turning points, and the close calls. Each journey is a researched feature article with a dated fact file. Figures come from public sources and carry an as-of date.

Site: https://startup.talk/
Full text of every journey in one file: https://startup.talk/llms-full.txt

## Journeys

- [Flipkart](https://startup.talk/india/flipkart/): founded by Sachin Bansal, Binny Bansal. Two ex-Amazon engineers started by delivering books with cash on delivery in a market where online payments were scarce, then built logistics (eKart) and scaled into a general marketplace.
- [Zomato](https://startup.talk/india/zomato/): founded by Deepinder Goyal, Pankaj Chaddah. A restaurant menu and review site pivoted in 2015 into food delivery, which became the core business.
- [Swiggy](https://startup.talk/india/swiggy/): founded by Sriharsha Majety, Nandan Reddy, Rahul Jaimini. After a failed courier idea (Bundl), the founders pivoted to restaurant delivery with its own fleet in 2014.
- [Paytm](https://startup.talk/india/paytm/): founded by Vijay Shekhar Sharma. Demonetisation in Nov 2016 pushed millions to digital wallets and QR payments, and Paytm, already with a wallet and mobile-recharge base, became the default for small merchants.
- [PhonePe](https://startup.talk/india/phonepe/): founded by Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari, Burzin Engineer. Launching one of the first UPI apps in August 2016, just before demonetisation-driven digital payments exploded, and with Flipkart's customer base behind it, PhonePe became the largest UPI app (~700M...
- [Zerodha](https://startup.talk/india/zerodha/): founded by Nithin Kamath, Nikhil Kamath. Flat-fee discount brokerage with a self-built tech platform (Kite) undercut full-service brokers on price.
- [Razorpay](https://startup.talk/india/razorpay/): founded by Harshil Mathur, Shashank Kumar. Developer-friendly payment gateway APIs that let Indian merchants accept payments quickly, later extended to banking, lending and payroll.
- [CRED](https://startup.talk/india/cred/): founded by Kunal Shah. Using credit scores to gate a premium, members-only club of reliable bill payers, then monetizing the high-quality audience through rewards and commerce.
- [Nykaa](https://startup.talk/india/nykaa/): founded by Falguni Nayar. Falguni Nayar left investment banking at Kotak to build an online beauty destination with authentic products, then added own brands and physical stores, creating an omnichannel model.
- [PolicyBazaar](https://startup.talk/india/policybazaar/): founded by Yashish Dahiya, Alok Bansal, Avaneesh Nirjar. Aggregating insurance quotes online made a confusing product comparable.
- [OYO](https://startup.talk/india/oyo/): founded by Ritesh Agarwal. Agarwal began with Oravel, a listing site for stays, then pivoted to standardising budget hotels under one brand with guaranteed quality, tech-led pricing and aggressive hotel onboarding.
- [Ola](https://startup.talk/india/ola/): founded by Bhavish Aggarwal, Ankit Bhati. A bad taxi experience prompted Aggarwal and Bhati to build a cab-booking platform.
- [Ola Electric](https://startup.talk/india/ola-electric/): founded by Bhavish Aggarwal, Anand Shah. Ola Electric built its own scooter plant in Tamil Nadu (the Future Factory) and sold directly online, starting S1 deliveries in Dec 2021, then listed in Aug 2024.
- [Byju's](https://startup.talk/india/byju-s/): founded by Byju Raveendran, Divya Gokulnath. Raveendran's popular classroom teaching of CAT and school maths became an animated video-based app in 2015, reaching mass adoption by 2018 with 15M users and 900,000 paid.
- [Meesho](https://startup.talk/india/meesho/): founded by Vidit Aatrey, Sanjeev Barnwal. Meesho let small resellers sell without holding inventory, then grew into a low-price marketplace that reached ~120M monthly users by 2022 and 500M downloads by 2023.
- [Lenskart](https://startup.talk/india/lenskart/): founded by Peyush Bansal, Amit Chaudhary, Sumeet Kapahi. Lenskart combined online ordering with in-house manufacturing and a large network of owned stores, cutting eyeglass prices and delivery time.
- [Dream11](https://startup.talk/india/dream11/): founded by Harsh Jain, Bhavit Sheth. Dream11 turned cricket fandom into a daily habit by letting fans build fantasy teams for the IPL and every international match.
- [Freshworks](https://startup.talk/india/freshworks/): founded by Girish Mathrubootham, Shan Krishnasamy. Freshdesk offered simple, affordable help-desk software to small businesses that could not afford heavy tools, and was sold globally from India.
- [Zoho](https://startup.talk/india/zoho/): founded by Sridhar Vembu, Tony Thomas, Sreenivas Kanumuru, Kumar Vembu, Sekar Vembu, Shailesh Kumar Davey. Zoho built a broad suite of business apps at low prices, funded by its own profits rather than venture capital .
- [Groww](https://startup.talk/india/groww/): founded by Lalit Keshre, Harsh Jain, Ishan Bansal, Neeraj Singh. Groww made investing in mutual funds and stocks simple for first-time Indian investors through a clean mobile app .
- [Physics Wallah](https://startup.talk/india/physics-wallah/): founded by Alakh Pandey, Prateek Maheshwari. Alakh began posting JEE physics videos with a marker, whiteboard and phone for students who could not afford coaching, and the channel hit 10,000 subscribers within a year.
- [Zepto](https://startup.talk/india/zepto/): founded by Aadit Palicha, Kaivalya Vohra. After KiranaKart's reliance on local kirana stores produced inconsistent delivery, the founders switched to owning dark stores and delivery, promising groceries in about ten minutes.
- [boAt](https://startup.talk/india/boat/): founded by Aman Gupta, Sameer Mehta. The founders saw a gap in India between cheap, poorly made accessories and expensive global brands.
- [Mamaearth](https://startup.talk/india/mamaearth/): founded by Varun Alagh, Ghazal Alagh. When their first child arrived, the Alaghs could not find chemical-free baby products easily in India and had to import them or ask friends to bring them.
- [Delhivery](https://startup.talk/india/delhivery/): founded by Sahil Barua, Mohit Tandon, Bhavesh Manglani, Suraj Saharan, Kapil Bharati. The Bain consultants picked the problem they found the 'most interesting' in internet and built delivery for e-commerce players.
- [Urban Company](https://startup.talk/india/urban-company/): founded by Abhiraj Singh Bhal, Varun Khaitan, Raghav Chandra. Abhiraj and Varun could not find a reliable plumber, electrician or beautician through referrals or directories.
- [FirstCry](https://startup.talk/india/firstcry/): founded by Supam Maheshwari, Amitava Saha. A new father who could not find good baby products in India, Maheshwari stuffed suitcases with diapers and toys on business trips.
- [MakeMyTrip](https://startup.talk/india/makemytrip/): founded by Deep Kalra, Rajesh Magow, Keyur Joshi, Sachin Bhatia. After the dot-com bust nearly killed the company, MakeMyTrip focused on the NRI market (US travellers visiting India), where Indians were searching online but not yet booking, and survived on tight...
- [InMobi](https://startup.talk/india/inmobi/): founded by Naveen Tewari, Mohit Saxena, Amit Gupta, Abhay Singhal. Tewari took InMobi global early, when Indian startups rarely did, and it reached unicorn status in 2011 on a $200M SoftBank round, becoming India's first.
- [Glance](https://startup.talk/india/glance/): founded by Naveen Tewari, Piyush Shah, Abhay Singhal, Mohit Saxena. Tewari wanted a consumer-facing platform after rebuilding InMobi.
- [ShareChat](https://startup.talk/india/sharechat/): founded by Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Pratap Singh, Farid Ahsan. ShareChat bet early that India's next hundreds of millions of internet users wanted to talk in their own languages, not English.
- [Unacademy](https://startup.talk/india/unacademy/): founded by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh. A free YouTube-style platform for UPSC and exam prep, taught by educators like Roman Saini, built an audience first and a paywall later.
- [upGrad](https://startup.talk/india/upgrad/): founded by Ronnie Screwvala, Mayank Kumar, Phalgun Kompalli, Ravijot Chugh. A media tycoon who had just sold UTV to Disney decided Indian working adults needed degrees and skills online.
- [Udaan](https://startup.talk/india/udaan/): founded by Sujeet Kumar, Amod Malviya, Vaibhav Gupta. Three Flipkart veterans saw that India's millions of kirana stores, chemists and small traders bought through patchy local wholesalers.
- [Infra.Market](https://startup.talk/india/infra-market/): founded by Souvik Sengupta, Aaditya Sharda. Instead of only listing contractors and suppliers, Infra.Market also took ownership of supply by building its own brands and plants, from ready-mix concrete to tiles and paints.
- [OfBusiness](https://startup.talk/india/ofbusiness/): founded by Asish Mohapatra, Ruchi Kalra, Bhuvan Gupta, Vasant Sridhar, Nitin Jain. Mohapatra realised small manufacturers lacked access to both raw materials and credit, so OfBusiness bundled procurement with financing.
- [Zetwerk](https://startup.talk/india/zetwerk/): founded by Amrit Acharya, Srinath Ramakkrushnan, Rahul Sharma, Vishal Chaudhary (spelled Chaturvedi in task brief), Ankit Fatehpuria. Zetwerk connected large buyers of fabricated metal and capital goods with a network of small factories, then took on execution and quality control itself, turning a fragmented supplier base into a...
- [Pine Labs](https://startup.talk/india/pine-labs/): founded by Lokvir Kapoor, Rajul Garg, Tarun Upadhyay. Pine Labs began with petrol-pump card automation and then pivoted to Android POS terminals at retail counters, building the merchant relationships that later carried its payments, loyalty and credit...
- [BharatPe](https://startup.talk/india/bharatpe/): founded by Ashneer Grover, Shashvat Nakrani, Bhavik Koladiya. A free, interoperable QR code that accepted any UPI app gave small shopkeepers one code to rely on, and BharatPe then used transaction data to offer them loans.
- [Postman](https://startup.talk/india/postman/): founded by Abhinav Asthana, Ankit Sobti, Abhijit Kane. Asthana's Yahoo-era annoyance with testing internal APIs became a free Chrome extension that spread through developer word of mouth to 500,000 users before Postman was even a company.
- [BrowserStack](https://startup.talk/india/browserstack/): founded by Ritesh Arora, Nakul Aggarwal. While building a website for their consulting business, the founders found that testing it on old Internet Explorer versions was the hardest part.
- [Chargebee](https://startup.talk/india/chargebee/): founded by Krish Subramanian, Rajaraman Santhanam, Saravanan KP, Thiyagarajan T. Chargebee bet early that subscription businesses needed a layer to run recurring billing on top of payment gateways.
- [Innovaccer](https://startup.talk/india/innovaccer/): founded by Abhinav Shashank, Kanav Hasija, Sandeep Gupta. After starting from a data analytics project and early work with academic partners, the founders decided in early 2016 to focus on healthcare.
- [Icertis](https://startup.talk/india/icertis/): founded by Samir Bodas, Monish Darda. Icertis built contract management as an AI-driven cloud platform on Microsoft Azure, turning contracts from filing-cabinet documents into a system that flags risky clauses and compliance issues for...
- [Darwinbox](https://startup.talk/india/darwinbox/): founded by Jayant Paleti, Rohit Chennamaneni, Chaitanya Peddi, Vineet Singh. Darwinbox built a cloud HR platform for large, complex Indian and Asian workforces and then sold it abroad.
- [Druva](https://startup.talk/india/druva/): founded by Jaspreet Singh, Milind Borate, Ramani Kothandaraman. Druva stopped selling a clunky enterprise product from Pune and rebuilt itself as a cloud-native data protection service, then moved to Silicon Valley.
- [Rapido](https://startup.talk/india/rapido/): founded by Aravind Sanka, Pavan Guntupalli, SR Rishikesh. Rapido's founders realised trucks and cars were the wrong vehicle for a cost-sensitive consumer and chose two-wheelers, with captains using their own bikes.
- [BlackBuck](https://startup.talk/india/blackbuck/): founded by Rajesh Kumar Naidu Yabaji, Chanakya Hridaya, Ramasubramaniam Balasubramaniam. Yabaji, then at ITC's supply chain, saw an industry that ran on phone calls and middlemen and built a marketplace matching shippers with truck operators.
- [CarDekho](https://startup.talk/india/cardekho/): founded by Amit Jain, Anurag Jain, Umang Kumar. In January 2008 the Jain brothers went to the Delhi Auto Expo and decided car-buying information should be online.
- [Cars24](https://startup.talk/india/cars24/): founded by Vikram Chopra, Mehul Agrawal, Gajendra Jangid, Ruchit Agarwal. Cars24 saw used-car selling as 'in utter chaos' and used inspection plus instant pricing to turn it into an assured, fast sale with a buyback guarantee.
- [Spinny](https://startup.talk/india/spinny/): founded by Niraj Singh, Ramanshu Mahaur, Mohit Gupta, Ganesh Pawar. Two friends noticed how many people they knew had been burned buying used cars.
- [Licious](https://startup.talk/india/licious/): founded by Abhay Hanjura, Vivek Gupta. Licious decided to own the whole chain from farm to doorstep: processing in its own facilities, a cold chain, and a brand that promised the meat would arrive fresh and clean.
- [Country Delight](https://startup.talk/india/country-delight/): founded by Chakradhar Gade, Nitin Kaushal. Two finance professionals chose milk because it is a daily need and built a traceable cold chain from farm to bottle, sending lab-tested quality reports with early orders.
- [Cult.fit](https://startup.talk/india/cult-fit/): founded by Mukesh Bansal, Ankit Nagori, Rishabh Telang and Deepak Poduva. After Myntra, Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori bet on fitness as a daily habit.
- [PharmEasy](https://startup.talk/india/pharmeasy/): founded by Dharmil Sheth, Dhaval Shah, Siddharth Shah, Hardik Dedhia, Harsh Parekh. After two failed attempts (Dialhealth.com and a retail store chain), the founders learned the pharma supply chain by running a distribution business.
- [Practo](https://startup.talk/india/practo/): founded by Shashank ND, Abhinav Lal. Practo first digitised doctors with Practo Ray clinic software, selling it door to door when no one believed doctors would pay for it.
- [Pristyn Care](https://startup.talk/india/pristyn-care/): founded by Harsimarbir Singh, Dr Garima Sawhney, Dr Vaibhav Kapoor. Pristyn Care treated elective surgery as one managed experience rather than a hospital search problem.
- [Dailyhunt](https://startup.talk/india/dailyhunt/): founded by Virendra Gupta, Umang Bedi. Gupta bought a little Symbian news app and then solved what blocked ordinary Indians from using it: phones that could not display Hindi and slow 2G networks.
- [Pocket FM](https://startup.talk/india/pocket-fm/): founded by Rohan Nayak, Prateek Dixit, Nishanth KS. After pivoting away from podcasts, Pocket FM bet on episodic fiction, with first episodes free and the rest paid per episode.
- [Ather Energy](https://startup.talk/india/ather-energy/): founded by Tarun Mehta, Swapnil Jain. The founders first thought of selling batteries and chargers, then realised customers wanted the finished scooter.
- [Rebel Foods](https://startup.talk/india/rebel-foods/): founded by Jaydeep Barman, Kallol Banerjee. Moving from one delivery-only brand, Faasos, to a kitchen-only model in 2016 and then running many brands out of shared kitchens, including partnerships such as Wendy's.
- [Vedantu](https://startup.talk/india/vedantu/): founded by Vamsi Krishna, Pulkit Jain, Anand Prakash, Saurabh Saxena. Live, interactive online classes taught by the company's own teachers, which let it scale tutoring across India during the pandemic.
- [Eruditus](https://startup.talk/india/eruditus/): founded by Ashwin Damera, Chaitanya Kalipatnapu. Partnering with elite global universities to deliver their executive courses online, and then building scale beyond India.
- [Acko](https://startup.talk/india/acko/): founded by Varun Dua. Selling insurance directly and through partner platforms like Amazon and Ola, without an agent network.
- [Go Digit](https://startup.talk/india/go-digit/): founded by Kamesh Goyal. A digital-first general insurer that went public in May 2024 and reached over INR 11,000 Cr in premium by FY26.
- [Zeta](https://startup.talk/india/zeta/): founded by Bhavin Turakhia, Ramki Gaddipati. Turakhia, already wealthy from selling his web businesses, put his own money into building a modern banking core and then landed Sodexo as an anchor customer and investor.
- [Perfios](https://startup.talk/india/perfios/): founded by V.R. Govindarajan, Debasish Chakraborty. Perfios bet early that the bottleneck in lending would be decision-making, not capital.
- [Uniphore](https://startup.talk/india/uniphore/): founded by Umesh Sachdev, Ravi Saraogi. Uniphore moved to the US and bet on speech and emotion AI in contact centres, where it could sell to global enterprises.
- [Fractal Analytics](https://startup.talk/india/fractal-analytics/): founded by Srikanth Velamakanni, Pranay Agrawal, Nirmal Palaparthi, Pradeep Suryanarayan, Ramakrishna Reddy. The founders wrote a free 32-page white paper on credit-scoring models to win ICICI as a client, then built the models.
- [Mindtickle](https://startup.talk/india/mindtickle/): founded by Krishna Depura, Nishant Mungali, Mohit Garg, Deepak Diwakar. The founders realised the gamification used to engage employees could be turned into a platform that trains and coaches sales reps.

## Pages

- [About](https://startup.talk/about/): why Startup Talk exists
- [Share your journey](https://startup.talk/share/): request an invite to write your own founder journey

## Optional

- [Sitemap](https://startup.talk/sitemap.xml)