Unicorns meet Piyush Goyal, plan to set up ‘startups club’ to raise issues

Leaders from 54 out of the 111 unicorns in India, or startups with valuation exceeding $1 billion, met with commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal on Wednesday.

The discussion focused on the growth trajectory of the Indian startup ecosystem, the role of domestic capital in nurturing and scaling startups and India's position in the international startup landscape.

The startup leaders in attendance were Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma; Rikant Pitti, cofounder of EaseMyTrip; Sandeep Aggarwal, founder of Droom; Deepinder Goyal, founder of Zomato; Aman Gupta, cofounder of BoAt and representatives from Flipkart, Phonepe, Swiggy, OYO, and Zerodha.


The meeting, which lasted four hours, planned to set up a ‘Startup Club of India’, to jointly raise issues with the government to improve the startup ecosystem in the country.

"An idea was floated by the Minister to make a club of unicorns or association of startups, which was a good idea and we will try to make a club of unicorns or association of startups. With the association of startups, we can also come up with many solutions, like connecting with bankers and investors to get access to capital," Vijay Shekhar Sharma said.

"We discussed domestic capital versus international capital and how to deepen the startup ecosystem in the country. We discussed the challenges we are facing. All the founders of Unicorns have made suggestions to the minister. I belong to the travel industry and recently we started a campaign 'nation first, business later', we discussed that as well," EaseMyTrip's Pitti.

Sandeep Aggarwal said that the discussion was for our entrepreneurial community. "We request that the minister smooth out the company law matters related to startups. The second issue was capital access; how can we increase capital access in tier 3 cities? and some tax issues were discussed broadly. The minister was very receptive to our suggestions," said Aggarwal.

Sanjiv, Joint Secretary, DPIIT, said, "The purpose of this meeting was to improve the startup ecosystem of the country. Unicorn founders are great mentors. We got suggestions from them. With their mentorship, we want to build the number-one startup ecosystem in the world."