A comparative study of the Indian and Israeli startup ecosystems

Abstract

With India witnessing a tremendous growth in the number of unicorns produced in the last 2 years, it has established itself as the world's unicorn capital. From the surface, it looks like a beautiful success story, however, in the past few months, Indian start-ups, and even unicorns, have had to take some tough decisions, such as laying off hundreds of employees. This is not merely to improve the efficiency of their business to get a better bottom-line, but also due to the "funding winter" that is being faced globally. We have examined the problem from two perspectives: first, through a detailed analysis of what the Indian unicorns in certain sectors are actually doing when compared to their counterparts in Israel and secondly, through an extended analysis of why they are doing what they do, based on the culture, availability offunding, talent and other important factors. These factors often form the crux of each start-up ecosystem, resulting in distinct characteristics in each of them. The project utilizes analysis on data collected through secondary resources.