14 Charts That Defined 2025 For Indian Tech & Startups

As 2025 unfolds, India’s startup and digital economy story is no longer just about momentum — it is about magnitude. This was the year India crossed milestones that once felt distant: over 100 crore internet users, $825 Bn+ in total exports, a record $80.6 Bn in FDI, and a decisive climb to 38th place in the Global Innovation Index.

Scale, finally, met structure.

If earlier years were defined by experimentation and excess, 2025 marks a phase where the ecosystem began operating at national scale. Internet penetration pushed digital commerce, entertainment and payments into the mainstream.

Exports were no longer driven by a handful of sectors alone, with electronics, led by smartphones, emerging as a dominant growth engine, while services exports continued to outpace merchandise. Innovation, too, became measurable, with patent filings jumping 180% in just five years.

What stands out most, however, is how demand and capital converged. Gen Z emerged as India’s most powerful consumer cohort, credit cards quietly took over ecommerce checkouts, and startups still managed to raise $11 Bn in funding, even in a selective capital environment.

Behind the scenes, India reinforced its long-term fundamentals, from higher nuclear power generation to sustained FDI inflows, strengthening the backbone that startups build upon.

Now, we step back to capture this shift. These are not isolated data points, but interconnected signals of an economy moving from promise to performance.

The following 14 charts trace Indian tech’s journey through 2025, a year where the country scaled new peaks in digital adoption, exports and innovation, while laying the groundwork for what could be its most consequential growth decade yet.

In 2025, India’s startup IPO ecosystem hit a milestone with 18 companies going public, raising nearly INR 33,Cr and delivering substantial returns for early investors.

Prominent VCs such as Peak XV Partners, Accel, Tiger Global, Elevation Capital, and Y Combinator saw significant liquidity, with Peak XV alone netting over INR 2,480 Cr from Groww, Pine Labs, Wakefit, and Urban Company.

Y Combinator’s early bets on Groww and Meesho generated returns of 29x and 109x respectively, while Accel and Tiger Global also realised multi-fold gains across multiple listings.

The wave of IPOs not only unlocked liquidity for investors but also showed public markets as a strategic exit route, potentially encouraging further capital recycling into startups.

Mega deals continued to lose momentum in 2025, reinforcing a structural reset that has been underway since the 2021 peak and was visible across several high-profile developments during the year.

Funding rounds of $100 Mn or more fell 25% YoY as large, mature startups increasingly avoided late-stage private raises and instead leaned on IPOs, pre-IPO placements, rights issues, or secondary share sales to provide liquidity.

The year saw a steady pipeline of public market moves and IPO preparations across consumer tech, fintech and internet platforms, which directly reduced the need for traditional mega rounds.

Notably, 18 startups tapped public markets in 2025, spanning fintech, ecommerce, EVs, consumer tech and services.

In 2025, Indian startups collectively raised $11 Bn, reflecting a steady recovery after the peak funding years of 2021 and 2022.

While the total funding in 2025 is far below the 2021 high of $41 Bn, it also indicates a more stable and sustainable investment environment compared to the massive spikes seen after the COVID pandemic.

The number of deals in 2025 stood at 936, showing a slight dip from 2024 but remaining close to the 1,000-deal mark seen in previous years, suggesting that investors are still actively backing startups, albeit with smaller deal sizes on average.

In 2025, India’s deeptech ecosystem grabbed national attention after Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal publicly challenged the startup community to move beyond consumer tech and build foundational technologies like AI, semiconductors, robotics and advanced manufacturing, calling the current landscape “disturbing” given how few startups operate in core deep‑tech domains and urging greater innovation ambition.

This spurred action from both government and investors: the Startup Fund of Funds was increasingly allocated to deeptech ventures, new programmes like #100DesiDeepTechs were launched.

Additionally, the government made generative AI a strategic priority, backing it with substantial initiatives and funding.

Under the IndiaAI Mission, over INR 10,300 Cr has been allocated over five years to build infrastructure, deploy 38,000 GPUs and support research, talent and safe innovation across the AI stack.

Gen Z is rapidly emerging as India’s most influential consumption driver. As of 2025, Gen Z already accounts for $860 Bn of consumption spending, about 43% of India’s total $2 Tn consumption base.

This is not a future-facing trend; it is already embedded in how demand is shaping across categories such as ecommerce, food delivery, fashion, gaming and digital services.

The influence is set to deepen over the next decade. By 2030, Gen Z-driven spends are projected to rise to $1.4 Tn, forming 46% of total consumption, and by 2035, touching $2 Tn, or half of India’s $3.9 Tn consumption market.

Credit cards are steadily expanding their footprint in India’s ecommerce ecosystem, signalling a shift in how online consumption is being financed.

Between FY22 and FY25, credit card transaction value in ecommerce rose from $9 Bn to $15 Bn, while volumes nearly doubled from 110 Mn to 228 Mn. In contrast, debit card usage declined across both value and volume, underscoring a behavioural pivot, from pay-now to pay-later modes of spending.

This penetration is being driven by a mix of factors: aggressive card issuance by banks and fintechs, co-branded ecommerce cards, no-cost EMIs, BNPL-like reward structures, and rising urban consumption among Gen Z and millennials.

Credit cards also align better with higher-ticket ecommerce categories such as electronics, travel, quick commerce and subscriptions, where flexibility and short-term credit materially influence checkout decisions.

India’s startup ecosystem continued to expand at scale in 2025, with over 2 Lakh startups recognised by DPIIT since the launch of the Startup India initiative.

The growth curve has steepened sharply post-2020, reflecting both policy push and widening entrepreneurial participation beyond metro hubs. From just 500 recognised startups in 2016, the count has multiplied more than 400x in under a decade, signalling institutionalisation of startup formation rather than sporadic bursts.

This expansion has translated directly into employment creation. Cumulative jobs generated by DPIIT-recognised startups crossed 2 Mn in 2025, up from about 50,000 in 2017.

The acceleration after 2021 coincides with rapid growth in SaaS, ecommerce, logistics, fintech and deeptech startups, which tend to scale headcount faster once product-market fit is achieved.

India’s internet economy is now operating at true mass scale, with 886 Mn+ active internet users forming the base of digital consumption.

Alongside which, India’s entertainment landscape saw fresh startup momentum in 2025, particularly around micro-drama and mobile-native video formats. A wave of young platforms, like Flick TV, Reelies and Kuku TV, raised funding to build short-form, serialised content tailored for mobile viewers.

Regional and niche platforms have also gained traction, with regional OTT startup Stage closing a $12.5 Mn Series B to deepen hyper-local content.

Meanwhile, as ecommerce continues to grow in the country, 2025 was also a landmark year for India’s quick commerce sector, marked by intense competition and rapid expansion, with players like Blinkit, Instamart, and Zepto racing to scale delivery networks, enter new cities, and capture market share.

Despite heightened trade frictions and policy uncertainty between the US and India, India’s export momentum did not weaken.

Instead, overall exports remained resilient through FY25 and into the first half of FY26, underscoring the sector’s ability to absorb geopolitical and global trade shocks.

The sustained performance suggests that demand diversification and India’s entrenched strength in services exports, particularly IT, digital and professional services, helped offset external pressures, even as merchandise exports continued to grow at a more measured pace

India recorded a strong rebound in foreign capital inflows in FY25, attracting $80.6 Bn in FDI, marking the highest level since FY22 and reaffirming long-term investor confidence in the economy.

This comes as the commerce ministry floated a proposal to allow FDI in inventory-based ecommerce models strictly for exports, signalling a calibrated attempt to boost outbound trade without disrupting domestic retailers.

On the other, the Cabinet’s approval to raise the FDI cap in insurance to 100% marked a decisive liberalisation of a capital-intensive sector aimed at improving insurance penetration and attracting long-term global investors.

Under the Viksit Bharat @2047 mission, the government has set the target to be in the top 5 countries globally in terms of patent filings and build one of the largest stacks of domestically owned IPs.

And while patent filings have increased 180% from 24,326 applications in FY21 to 68,176 in FY25, India is still too far behind when it comes to competition with the likes of China and the US.

For instance, in 2024 alone, China’s National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) received a staggering 1.8 Mn patent applications, making it by far the world’s largest patent-filing jurisdiction and more than three times the volume of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

India is set to retain its position as the world’s fastest-growing major economy in 2026, reinforcing its status as the key outlier in an otherwise slowing global growth landscape.

IMF projections show India growing at 6.2% in 2026, following a strong 6.6% expansion in 2025, well ahead of peers like China, the US, Japan and Germany.

What underpins this divergence is the depth of India’s domestic demand and investment cycle.

Rapid expansion in sectors like ecommerce along with quick commerce and digital consumer platforms has accelerated urban consumption and supply-chain efficiency, while sustained public capex, rising manufacturing capacity, and steady foreign capital inflows continue to anchor growth.

India is expanding its nuclear power capacity as part of its clean-energy and energy security strategy.

In December 2025, Parliament passed the SHANTI Bill, opening India’s nuclear sector to private investment by dismantling decades-old legal barriers that restricted nuclear power to state-owned entities.

The government has also launched a Nuclear Energy Mission targeting about 100 GW of nuclear capacity by 2047, with INR 20,000 Cr allocated for research and development of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and plans to have at least five indigenously developed SMRs operational by 2033.

India’s electronics exports crossed a major inflection point in FY25, rising to over $38 Bn, as a wave of large-scale manufacturing investments announced and executed through 2025 began translating into export outcomes.

The year saw multiple smartphone and electronics manufacturing expansions across Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh, including fresh assembly lines, component plants and capacity additions by global OEMs and their contract manufacturers.

These announcements reinforced India’s position as a key alternative manufacturing base in global electronics supply chains. Clearly so, smartphones emerged as the clear growth engine, with exports surging to $24 Bn in FY25 and accounting for more than 60% of total electronics export growth.

The share of smartphones in electronics exports has risen sharply from just 4–5% in 2020–21 to 63% in FY25, reflecting not only scale-up in final assembly but also gradual progress in localisation of components and deeper supplier ecosystems.