BENGALURU: The new tag for Namma Bengaluru after being the IT city or Garden city is the ‘unicorn capital of India’.

Of a total of 8 unicorn startups in the country, Bengaluru is home to five of them including Flipkart, Ola, InMobi, Quikr and MuSigma. The rest in the list of unicorn startups in India are Snapdeal, Zomato and Paytm. The last three are Delhi based projects.

Unicorn brackets those startups that are valued $1billion or more, as Aileen Lee describes.

The total number of unicorn startups and their cumulated valuation globally is 140 and billion respectively, as per CB data.

Wall Street Journal records reflect, that these 8 unicorn Indian startups are led by Flipkart valued $15 billion. Taxi startup Ola that lately shifted its headquarters from Mumbai to Bengaluru values Rs5 billion.

At global level, taxi startup Uber the list of unicorn startups with a valuation over $50 billion.

Co-founder of software products think tank Ispirt, Sharad Sharma comments "Bengaluru's tech-first culture lends itself to its startups taking category leadership. This has contributed to Bengaluru having more homegrown unicorns than other cities in India."

Sharma also added, "Startups need to re-factor their teams, processes, category positioning and marketing to achieve significant growth." Bengaluru, according to him, offers all these parameters. "The ability to operate from India and sell to the world is possible if you have effective marketing to constantly drive the right traffic to your site, get people to trust your product, help them sign up to see value and then convert them into customers. If you become world class at this, you could become a category lead..”

Nasscom Product Council chairman Ravi Gururaj indentified the reason for Bengaluru being the hot spot for startups. In his words, "Why do unicorns grow in Bengaluru? Because that's where the nurturing ecosystem is - you discover talent, connect with investors, hire from MNC R&D centres and large IT service companies, learn from other peer startups and enjoy great weather. All these make Bengaluru India's most attractive city for leading startups."

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