India registered a record of 11 unicorns (start-ups valued at $1 billion or more) in 2020. Two companies Glance and Dailyhunt got registered as unicorns after securing a huge amount of investments from various groups on Tuesday.
In 2019, a total of nine ventures turned into unicorns and a year before that, that number was at eight.
After the COVID-19 pandemic was declared and economies around the world were shut, marquee venture capital firm Sequoia Capital warned of the possibility of a ‘black swan’ like year. However, the large number of funds poured in start-up ventures around the world by leading economies ensured the opposite.
InMobi Groups’ Glance on Tuesday announced that it has raised a total of $145 million from Tech-giant Google and existing investor Mithril Capital which is an investment fund of Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and Palantir Technologies. Glance provides a dynamic-interactive content on the lock screen of android phones.
Dailyhunt, a local language-based news and content platform, on Tuesday said it has raised $100 million in new capital from Microsoft, Google, Falcon Edge’s investment unit Alpha Wave, and other investors, at a valuation of over $1 billion.
companies that have managed to capture the positive side of the pandemic have seen good investor interest and raised capital at a high valuation, Mohan Kumar, founder and managing partner at software-focused Avatar Ventures, said.
“Companies that are enabling digitisation of business operations and have captured (market) and grown this year are the ones which investors are pleasantly surprised by, and they are rewarding those companies,” said Kumar.
