The year 2020 was very stressful for businesses across sectors like hospitality, travel, and particularly small business. But there are Indian startups that survived in this pandemic and entered the unicorn club with a value of over $ 1 billion due to their business models that managed to pull through the lockdown period.

We saw in the first half of the year, unicorn startups like OYO and Zomato were struggling, pay cuts, and layoffs of employees. Covid’s situation dwindled the investments and profits of startups.

While the Indian economy is suffering due to market collapse but still 11 companies became unicorn and raised about $ 12.8 billion.

List of Indian Startups entered in Unicorn Club in 2020

“2020 saw the emergence of digitization of a lot of consumer patterns, from education to essentials — central and long-standing purchasing habits were disrupted at its core — and most of these changes are here to stay for 2021 and much beyond. Hence, digitech companies and startups which found themselves in these tectonic shifts in consumption patterns benefited immensely from a funding and valuation re-rating,” said Skanda Jayaraman, managing director, and head for investment banking at Spark Capital Advisors India.

India is expected to be home to 60,000 to 62,000 startups by 2025, including 100 unicorns, per a joint October report by TiE Delhi.

Many experts believe that these startups solved the customers’ problems or challenges when the markets and institutions were shut down. The startups from edtech to fintech continued to be on the rise like the startup Unacademy helped the students to upskill and prepare for entrance and government exams. The fintech apps like Razorpay and Pin Labs gave solutions to online payment for eCommerce that gave rise to digital payment and made retailers move on to contactless payments. And the apps like Zerodha gave the investors investment solutions.