India gains independence. A mixed economy takes shape — private enterprise operating alongside state planning and licensing.

Tata Sons starts Tata Consultancy Services in Bombay — India's first software services company.

Six engineers resign from DCM and start Hindustan Computers Limited out of a Delhi garage.

N.R. Narayana Murthy and six co-founders start Infosys in Pune with ₹10,000 in borrowed capital.

Economic liberalization dismantles the License Raj — foreign investment, private capital, and imports open up almost overnight.

VSNL switches on India's first public internet service — on Independence Day.

IndiaMART launches as a B2B marketplace for Indian manufacturers and exporters.

Rediff.com goes live — India's first major web portal.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani's Info Edge launches Naukri.com, India's first online jobs board.

Infosys becomes the first Indian company listed on Nasdaq.

Deep Kalra starts MakeMyTrip, betting Indians would book travel online.

redBus launches online bus ticketing from a Bangalore apartment — inventory no travel agent had bothered to digitize.

Sachin and Binny Bansal leave Amazon to sell books online as Flipkart.

Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah start Foodiebay, a restaurant menu directory — later renamed Zomato.

Dream11 launches fantasy sports, years ahead of India's smartphone boom.

Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati start Ola Cabs.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma launches Paytm as a mobile recharge platform.

Nithin and Nikhil Kamath start Zerodha, discount broking for a generation that trades on its phone.

Girish Mathrubootham starts Freshdesk (later Freshworks) in Chennai.

Peyush Bansal starts Lenskart, betting India would buy prescription eyewear online.

Byju Raveendran starts Think and Learn — the company that becomes BYJU'S.

Falguni Nayar leaves a banking career to start Nykaa, betting on beauty e-commerce.

Sanjay Nekkanti starts Dhruva Space, quietly building satellite hardware for a private space industry that doesn't exist yet.

19-year-old Ritesh Agarwal starts OYO Rooms, standardizing India's budget hotels.

Swiggy launches food delivery in Bangalore.

Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar start Razorpay, payment infrastructure for Indian developers, out of Y Combinator.

Abhinav Asthana, Ankit Sobti, and Abhijit Kane start Postman, an API tool for developers that quietly becomes one of the most-used dev tools in the world.

Abhiraj Bahal, Raghav Chandra, and Varun Khaitan start UrbanClap — renamed Urban Company in 2020 — bringing home services online.

Meesho starts enabling social-commerce resellers on WhatsApp and Facebook.

Unacademy incorporates, turning a YouTube channel into an edtech company.

Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari, and Burzin Engineer start PhonePe.

ShareChat launches vernacular social media for languages English-first apps had ignored.

Reliance Jio launches, crashing the price of mobile data and bringing tens of millions online for the first time.

NPCI launches UPI, the real-time payments rail modern Indian fintech is built on.

The government launches Startup India, its formal push to back founders with tax breaks and easier compliance.

Demonetization pushes cash-first India toward digital payments overnight.

Srinath Ravichandran and Moin SPM start Agnikul Cosmos out of an IIT Madras incubator; by 2024 its 3D-printed Agnibaan engine — the world's first single-piece printed semi-cryogenic rocket engine — flies a successful test.

Walmart buys roughly 77% of Flipkart for $16 billion — the largest e-commerce acquisition in the world at the time.

Kunal Shah, after selling FreeCharge, starts CRED.

Udaan, started two years earlier by four ex-Flipkart employees, turns unicorn in under two years — the fastest Indian startup to do so at the time.

Ola spins out Ola Electric to build scooters as India's unicorn count climbs past 20.

Awais Ahmed and Kshitij Khandelwal start Pixxel at BITS Pilani, building hyperspectral imaging satellites — its first satellite reaches orbit in 2022.

The pandemic pulls edtech, healthtech, D2C, and grocery delivery years into the future in a matter of months.

Zomato lists in July — India's first major consumer-internet IPO.

Nykaa and Paytm both list in November; Paytm's ₹18,300 crore issue is India's largest IPO to date.

India mints roughly 44 new unicorns this year alone — more than the previous decade combined.

Teenage founders Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra start Zepto, promising groceries in ten minutes.

Groww, started in 2016 by four ex-Flipkart colleagues, joins the unicorn club.

A global funding winter reaches India — valuations reset and layoffs hit BYJU'S, Unacademy, and Ola alike.

Even as funding freezes, Skyroot Aerospace launches Vikram-S in November — India's first privately developed rocket to reach space.

Delhivery, the logistics network built since 2011, lists on the NSE and BSE.

BYJU'S valuation collapses from a $22 billion peak amid an auditor exit and boardroom departures.

Zepto becomes India's fastest company to reach unicorn status.

Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal starts Krutrim; by January 2024 it's India's first AI unicorn.

Honasa Consumer, the company behind Mamaearth, lists on the NSE and BSE — D2C beauty's first big IPO.

Ola Electric lists in August — India's first EV maker to go public.

Swiggy lists in November, years after its first food delivery order.

FirstCry lists, closing out a year in which India's startup IPO pipeline reopens after the funding winter.

Porter and Rapido — logistics and bike-taxi platforms both started a decade earlier — cross unicorn status within months of each other.

Quick commerce becomes the decade's defining fight, as Zepto, Blinkit, Instamart, and Flipkart Minutes race for the same ten-minute delivery window.

Ather Energy, the EV maker started in 2013, lists on the NSE and BSE in May.

Urban Company lists in September — home services goes public, eleven years after it started as UrbanClap.

Lenskart, selling eyewear online since 2010, lists in November at India's biggest consumer-tech IPO of the year.

PhysicsWallah, the YouTube-channel-turned-unicorn, lists in November — edtech's most-watched comeback story.

Skyroot's Vikram-1 reaches orbit in July — India's first private orbital launch, and only the third country after the US and China with that capability.

Sarvam AI, started in 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar out of IIT Madras' AI4Bharat, turns unicorn in June after raising $234 million — India's bet on sovereign AI across its 22 official languages.

Still going — over 100 unicorns and counting.