In the coffee shops of trendy Khan Market in Delhi, young people gather at what they consider to be the closest equivalent to a Starbucks in Palo Alto and speculate on which Indian tech company will be the next to command a $1bn valuation. But the prospect of sighting such a unicorn in India has become increasingly remote, says Rohit Prasad, author of Start-Up Sutra, a book about the Indian tech scene.
Young Chinese groups are increasingly closing the gap with or, in some cases, leapfrogging their US counterparts across a variety of sectors including fintech, medtech, big data and applications of artificial intelligence such as voice recognition. But most recent Indian start-ups have not had similar success.
In a way this is very counterintuitive. Elite Indian universities are as competitive as the top US institutions, with English widely spoken among the intelligentsia. There is a constant flow of human capital between the US and India, as Indian engineers work on the West Coast and bring ideas back home. Indian television stations sponsor start-up challenges and the government has had start-up initiatives for years now.