Is India Becoming the World Wide Leader In Producing Unicorns?

unicorn club

Logistics aggregator startup, Shiprocket recently became India’s  latest unicorn raising $1 billion spearheaded by Zomato. This development makes Shiprocket India’s 106th unicorn. The fundraising series was co-led by the duo of Lightrock India, and Temasek Holdings.

In an ongoing Series E round, The startup  made a special declaration allotting 59,793 preference shares issued at Rs43,394.13 per share to secure $33 million.  The current advance is a part of its Series E2 round. The technology logistics company which was founded in 2017 has grown tremendously, tripling in size to serve about 66 million clients annually.

Other investors that participated in the Series E round alongside Lightrock India, and Temasek Holdings (MacRitchie Investments Pte. Ltd) include PayPal Inc, Bertelsmann Nederland BV, Moore Strategic and MCP3 SPV LLC.

Fintrackr confirms that although the Ecommerce shipping solution platform  has not posted its FY22 financial statement, FY21 saw the company’s scale record a 2.2 times improvement. The recent fundraising has skyrocketed the company’s valuation to $1.3 billion. This is a massive leap from December 2021 valuation of $930 million when the company secured $185 million in a Series E round spearheaded by the trio of Zomato, Lightrock India, and Temasek Holdings. Since December’s Series E round, Shiprocket has added Omuni, Rocketbox, and Pickrr to its impressive acquisitions list.

Shiprocket is a technology logistics startup  designed for retailers to integrate shopping websites across shopping outlets such as Shopify and Magenta. The company boasts of about 250 thousand retailers who rely on their products and services. Through its services, Shiprocket facilitates an annual delivery of around 70 million shipments.

Of the 106 unicorns in the Indian startup community, 43 emerged in 2021. Since the beginning of 2022, 21 Indian Start-ups have exceeded the $1 valuation line. Judging by the numbers, and current tempo, achieving last year’s feat may be unrealistic.

The realities of the global market has heralded a crunchy time for the funding environment.  Start-ups are suffering the consequences of the panic, and uncertainties that investors are nursing. Expert projections are predicting that the number of unicorns in 2022, and 2023 will be an outcome of the funding winter.

As originally reported in (https://entrackr.com/2022/08/exclusive-zomato-backed-shiprocket-turns-unicorn/)