Indian Unicorns 2026: Every Startup That Entered the Billion-Dollar Club This Year
India's latest unicorn is a rocket company. Skyroot Aerospace crossed a $1.1 billion valuation in May 2026 with its orbital launch vehicle weeks away from the launchpad.
India’s unicorn class of 2026 keeps growing, and the sectors behind it keep shifting. What started the year as fintech infrastructure and space tech has, by mid-year, tilted heavily toward AI.
As of July 2026, India has 132 unicorns, collectively raising over $118 billion.
In 2026, India has seen 7 new unicorn startups so far.
The start of the funding winter in 2022 resulted in a sharp slowdown in unicorn creation over subsequent years. While 22 startups turned unicorns in 2022, just two entered the unicorn club in 2023. The count increased in 2024 with seven new unicorns, and 2025 saw six additions. As of July, 2026 has already surpassed last year’s full-year total, with five months still remaining.
Unlike previous years, when a single sector often dominated a given year’s unicorn class, 2026’s additions have spanned an unusually wide range: payments infrastructure, AI compute, consumer lending, aerospace, sovereign AI, proptech, and AI-native software development. If any single thread runs through the list, it is a preference among investors for companies with defensible infrastructure, proven revenue, or regulatory-compliant business models, over consumer apps competing primarily on growth and discounting.
The 7 New Indian Unicorns of 2026
1. Juspay
| Unicorn Date | January 2026 |
|---|---|
| Valuation | $1.2 Billion |
| Headquarters | Bengaluru, Karnataka |
| Sector | Fintech, Payments Infrastructure |
| Founders | Ramanathan RV and Vimal Kumar |
| Founded | 2012 |
Juspay became the first Indian unicorn of 2026, crossing the billion-dollar mark in January after raising a $50 million follow-on Series D round led by WestBridge Capital.
Juspay is a payments infrastructure company that processes over 300 million daily transactions, exceeding an annualised total payment volume of $1 trillion at 99.999% reliability. The company serves 500 plus top global enterprises and banks including Agoda, Amazon, Flipkart, Google, HSBC, IndiGo, Swiggy, Zepto, and Zurich Insurance.
Founded in 2012 by Ramanathan RV and Vimal Kumar in Bengaluru, Juspay spent over a decade building payment infrastructure that sits invisibly behind some of the world’s most recognised consumer platforms. Every time a customer checks out on Flipkart or pays for an IndiGo ticket, Juspay is handling the complexity of routing, fraud detection, conversion optimisation, and multi-gateway integration in the background.
The initial $60 million Series D was raised in April 2025 and led by Kedaara Capital with participation from existing investors SoftBank and Accel, bringing Juspay’s valuation to $1 billion. The January 2026 follow-on round of $50 million was led by WestBridge Capital and pushed the valuation to $1.2 billion. The round included both primary and secondary components, providing early investors and employees holding ESOPs a liquidity opportunity.
Juspay has expanded its global footprint across Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Europe, the UK, and North America, and recently established a new office in Singapore to serve as a strategic hub for its Asia-Pacific operations. The company is also advancing its open-source payments orchestration platform, empowering merchants with an interoperable, transparent, and modular solution.
2. Neysa
| Unicorn Date | February 16, 2026 |
|---|---|
| Valuation | $1.4 Billion |
| Headquarters | Mumbai, Maharashtra |
| Sector | AI Infrastructure, Cloud |
| Founders | Sharad Sanghi and Anindya Das |
| Founded | 2023 |
Neysa became the second Indian unicorn of 2026 in February, completing the most significant single capital raise in India’s AI infrastructure history.
Mumbai-based AI acceleration cloud platform Neysa announced a funding of over $1.2 billion, led by private equity funds affiliated with Blackstone along with multiple co-investors. The transaction includes $600 million in equity capital, while the company plans to raise an additional $600 million in debt financing, marking one of the largest capital raises in India’s AI infrastructure space.
Other equity investors participating in the round include Teachers’ Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Assets, and Nexus Venture Partners. The fresh capital will be used to scale Neysa’s AI infrastructure footprint, including the planned deployment of over 20,000 GPUs across the country.
Founded in 2023, Neysa builds and operates AI systems deployed within India, offering GPU-based infrastructure to support the training, fine-tuning, and deployment of AI workloads. The company serves enterprises and government institutions across sectors including financial services, technology, healthcare, and public services. Neysa positions itself as an AI acceleration cloud provider focused on sovereign compute, data assurance, and production-grade AI infrastructure.
The founding story carries significant credibility. Sharad Sanghi previously built Netmagic before it was acquired by NTT Communications. Co-founder Anindya Das serves as CTO and brings deep infrastructure engineering experience. Their narrative was clear from the beginning: the team that built the Indian internet is now building India’s AI infrastructure.
Prior to this round, Neysa had secured $20 million in seed funding in early 2024, followed by a $30 million Series A round in October 2024, backed by Nexus Venture Partners, NTT Venture Capital, Z47, and Anchorage Capital.
Neysa employs 110 people across offices in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai. Its flagship platform, Velocis, allows developers to discover, deploy, and scale AI workloads with a single-click interface. The company is currently deploying 20,000 plus GPUs across its Mumbai and Hyderabad hubs, accounting for nearly 30% of India’s total high-end AI compute capacity.
3. KreditBee
| Unicorn Date | April 8, 2026 |
|---|---|
| Valuation | $1.5 Billion |
| Headquarters | Bengaluru, Karnataka |
| Sector | Fintech, Consumer and Business Lending |
| Founders | Madhusudan Ekambaram, Karthikeyan Krishnaswamy, and Vivek Veda |
| Founded | 2018 |
KreditBee became the third Indian unicorn of 2026 and the first of the new financial year, crossing a $1.5 billion valuation in April after raising $280 million in a Series E round.
Advent-backed digital lender KreditBee raised approximately $280 million in a Series E funding round, valuing the company at around $1.5 billion. The round was led by Motilal Oswal Alternates, Hornbill Capital, and MUFG-backed Dragon Funds, with participation from WhiteOak Capital, A.P. Moller Holding, and existing investors including Premji Invest and Advent International. Of the total funding, around $220 million is primary capital and about $60 million is secondary, allowing early investors including Alpine Capital, Mirae Asset Naver Asia Growth Fund, and some employees to partially exit.
KreditBee operates as a digital lending platform offering personal loans, business loans, and loans against property to underserved segments of the Indian credit market. The platform uses technology-driven credit assessment to serve consumers and small businesses that traditional banks have historically been unable to reach profitably.
KreditBee last raised a round in 2023 at a $700 million valuation, meaning the company more than doubled its valuation in under three years, validated by a blue-chip investor group that includes some of the most respected names in Indian institutional finance.
The digital lending category has faced significant regulatory scrutiny in India over the past two years, with SEBI and the RBI implementing rules around digital lending norms, interest rate disclosures, and collection practices. KreditBee’s ability to raise a clean $280 million round at a $1.5 billion valuation with Premji Invest and Advent International participating signals that the company has navigated the regulatory environment without the compliance issues that hurt several of its smaller competitors.
4. Skyroot Aerospace
| Unicorn Date | May 7, 2026 |
|---|---|
| Valuation | $1.1 Billion |
| Headquarters | Hyderabad, Telangana |
| Sector | Aerospace, Space Tech, Deep Tech |
| Founders | Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka |
| Founded | 2018 |
Skyroot Aerospace became the fourth Indian unicorn of 2026 and India’s first-ever spacetech unicorn, crossing a $1.1 billion valuation in May after raising $60 million in a Series C round.
Skyroot Aerospace raised $60 million in a round co-led by Sherpalo Ventures and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, crossing a $1.1 billion valuation. The round also saw participation from BlackRock, Arkam Ventures, Playbook Partners, Shanghvi Family Office, and the founders of Greenko Group. Ram Shriram, a Silicon Valley investor and early backer of Google and Alphabet, joined Skyroot’s board as part of the investment.
Skyroot was founded in 2018 by former ISRO scientists Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka. The company builds the Vikram series of launch vehicles with the objective of offering specialised satellite launch services to clients worldwide. In 2022, Skyroot launched Vikram-S, the first privately manufactured Indian rocket to reach space.
Skyroot is the fourth startup to enter the unicorn club in 2026, following Juspay in January, Neysa in February, and KreditBee in April, and the first from India’s deep-tech hardware space.
The timing of the funding is significant. Skyroot’s Vikram-1 rocket, India’s first private orbital rocket, is targeting a launch from Sriharikota in June 2026. The Series C is explicitly execution capital: the funds are earmarked for scaling Vikram-1 launch cadence, expanding manufacturing at the Infinity Campus in Hyderabad, and accelerating Vikram-2 development.
Skyroot’s valuation moved from $519 million in a 2023 Series B to $1.1 billion in May 2026, more than doubling in roughly 30 months. Across nine rounds since its 2018 founding, Skyroot now counts 33 investors on its cap table, 25 institutions and 8 angels. Total funding raised stands at $160 million.
Skyroot’s entry into the unicorn club as a hardware-first, deep-tech company building launch vehicles for small satellite deployment is the most structurally unusual of the four 2026 unicorns. It competes in a global launch market estimated at $30 billion, targeting the rapidly growing demand for small satellite deployment services from commercial and government customers.
5. Sarvam AI
| Unicorn Date | June 15, 2026 |
|---|---|
| Valuation | $1.5 Billion |
| Headquarters | Bengaluru, Karnataka |
| Sector | AI, Sovereign Language Models |
| Founders | Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar |
| Founded | 2023 |
Sarvam AI became the fifth Indian unicorn of 2026 in June, crossing the billion-dollar mark after raising the first close of its Series B round at a $1.5 billion valuation.
Sarvam raised $234 million, with $150 million coming from HCLTech as lead strategic investor, acquiring more than a 10% stake in the process. Bessemer Venture Partners also participated, alongside existing backers Khosla Ventures and Peak XV Partners. Sarvam is targeting a total Series B raise of $300 million, meaning roughly $66 million of the round remains to be closed.
The company builds a full-stack sovereign AI platform spanning large language models, speech systems, document AI, and enterprise applications specifically designed for India’s 22 official languages, positioning itself around what the industry calls sovereign AI, systems developed and operated within a country’s own infrastructure and legal boundaries rather than depending on foreign providers.
Sarvam is not India’s first AI unicorn, that distinction belongs to Krutrim, founded by Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal, but the HCLTech investment gives it something few sovereign AI startups have: a direct, equity-linked pipeline into HCLTech’s global enterprise client base across North America, Europe, and Asia.
India’s AI startups collectively raised $1.48 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, accounting for 38% of all domestic startup funding that quarter, underscoring how central this sector has become to the unicorn class of 2026.
6. Square Yards
| Unicorn Date | June 23, 2026 |
|---|---|
| Valuation | $1 Billion+ |
| Headquarters | Gurugram, Haryana |
| Sector | Proptech, Real Estate and Mortgage |
| Founders | Tanuj Shori and Kanika Gupta |
| Founded | 2014 |
Square Yards became the sixth Indian unicorn of 2026, crossing a $1 billion valuation after raising ₹900 crore, or approximately $95 million, in a round comprising a mix of debt and equity.
The round was anchored by EAAA Alternatives, with participation from global corporate credit manager Muzinich & Co. It came just seven months after Square Yards had raised $35 million led by South Korea’s Smilegate Group at a $935 million post-money valuation, meaning the company crossed the unicorn threshold in well under a year.
Square Yards operates an integrated real estate and mortgage platform spanning property transactions, home loans, rentals, interior solutions, and property management. The company reported operating revenue crossing ₹2,000 crore in FY26 for the first time, with EBITDA margin expanding to 8% from 3% the year before, profitability metrics that are relatively rare among Indian unicorns at the point of crossing the billion-dollar mark. Square Yards is reportedly in talks to raise another $50 to $60 million at a valuation closer to $1.6 billion as it prepares for a planned IPO, making it, alongside KreditBee, one of the more financially mature entrants into this year’s unicorn class.
7. Emergent
| Unicorn Date | July 15, 2026 |
|---|---|
| Valuation | $1.5 Billion |
| Headquarters | Bengaluru, Karnataka |
| Sector | AI, No-Code Software Development |
| Founders | Mukund Jha and Madhav Jha |
| Founded | 2024/2025 |
Emergent became the seventh Indian unicorn of 2026, crossing a $1.5 billion valuation in July after raising $130 million in a Series C round, a fivefold jump in valuation within roughly six months of its $300 million Series B.
The round was led by private equity firm Creaegis, with new investors MNI Ventures-Claypond Capital and Sentinel Global joining, alongside existing backers Khosla Ventures, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed, Y Combinator, Prosus, Together, and Google’s AI Futures Fund. The round was entirely primary capital, with no secondary shares sold by founders or employees, taking Emergent’s total funding to $230 million since its founding.
Emergent was founded by Mukund Jha, a co-founder of quick commerce pioneer Dunzo, alongside his brother Madhav Jha, and enables non-technical entrepreneurs and small businesses to build production-ready web and mobile applications using autonomous AI agents rather than manual drag-and-drop tools. A user describes what they want in plain English, and a network of specialised agents handles interface design, backend database configuration, business logic, and cloud deployment separately.
The company says it has reached an annualised revenue run rate of roughly $120 million and signed over 200,000 paying customers across 190 countries, having enabled more than 12 million AI-powered applications since launch, with 70% of its users having no prior coding experience. Emergent is the third homegrown AI startup to reach unicorn status in 2026, after Krutrim and Sarvam, reflecting how much of this year’s unicorn creation in India has concentrated specifically in AI infrastructure and application-layer software.
What the 2026 Unicorn List Reflects
Every company that has entered India’s unicorn club in 2026 shares one trait worth noting regardless of how many more join the list before year-end: none of them are consumer-facing apps chasing growth purely through discounting. Whether the company is building payments rails, AI compute infrastructure, launch vehicles, sovereign language models, real estate technology, or AI-native software tools, each has anchored its story in a defensible technical or infrastructural moat, a regulatory-compliant path to revenue, or both.
The broader narrative around Indian unicorns in 2026 is centred on maturity rather than valuation alone. Investors are backing companies with demonstrated revenue, credible competitive moats, and a clear path to profitability, a meaningfully different bar than the growth-at-all-costs standard that defined India’s unicorn boom in 2021.
This list will be updated as new unicorns are confirmed through the rest of 2026.
[Disclaimer: This article has been updated to reflect unicorn additions confirmed as of July 2026. Any new entries to the unicorn club will be added and revised in this post as they are confirmed. If you find any information incorrect or outdated, please email us at corporate@ceovine.com and we will rectify it promptly.]