India’s fintech opportunity set has significantly expanded over the past five years due to strong demographics, the India Stack and the JAM trinity, the Aadhaar card and mobile connections.
India’s growth story is promising and presents tremendous opportunities for growth across sub-sectors from Payments and Lending to Insurance and Banking.

Unicorns
The unicorn club is growing. Looking back at 2021, this has been a record breaking year for the indian startup ecosystem. ​​
A record high of 44 Indian startups were valued over $1 billion this year, surpassing the United Kingdom (UK) as the third largest ecosystem with the most number of unicorns. Fintech remained the most funded sector. Indian fintech companies raised $10.6 billion in 2021 till December 22. In comparison, fintech startups had raised $4.3 billion in 2019 and $3.1 billion in 2020.

Compare that to 26 total unicorns minted in the past decade! Some of the fintech unicorns are: CRED (credit cards rewards and marketplace), BharatPe (SMB payments and credit), Digit Insurance (insurance), Slice (consumer credit), Mobikwik (payments), Groww (stock trading and investing), Chargebee (recurring payments SaaS), Zeta (banking infrastructure), OfBusiness (SMB credit), CoinDCX (crypto exchange), CoinSwitch Kuber (crypto exchange), Acko (insurance).

We believe our unicorns have the potential to match up to their global counterparts in the near future and generate immense value.

Acquisitions
2021 was a record year for fintech acquisitions! Starting with the mega acquisition – PayU India acquired BillDesk for $4.7bn. This acquisition was among India’s largest and the largest acquisition in the fintech sector. Then there was CRED that acquired Happay for $180mm.
There would be at least 40-50 acquisitions in India this year. History was made when BharatPe, a three-year old payments startup, was given approval to launch a bank! This is rare for Indian banking and more so for Indian fintech.

Funding
There’s no denying that fintech startups in India were on a tear this year. Fintech startups raised $9+bn in funding over 360+ deals. For context that’s a third of total funding raised by startups in India compared to a fourth in 2020. Fintech investments in 2021 was 3.2x that of 2020.

IPO’s
Most importantly, we saw the first ever IPO’s for fintech startups. Paytm and Policybazaar listed on the Indian stock exchanges and that’s huge.
The previous best year for IPO was 2017 when ₹68,827 crore was raised.