Women-led startups outperformed the overall startup ecosystem in India – Tracxn report

One Thing Today in Tech

The year 2022 saw women-led startups in India increase their share of venture capital investments and do better than the overall startup ecosystem in the country, even as the so-called funding winter descended on the sector amid worsening global macroeconomic conditions. Marquee investors such as Sequoia Capital and Accel as well as accelerators and incubators such as CIIE backed more women entrepreneurs, according to data from Tracxn, a Mumbai-listed private markets intelligence provider. Also in this brief, Spotify hit half a billion active users, the Swedish company said at its Stream On event.

Notes:

Apple is backing a music startup launched by one of its former executives, Reuters reports.

The company, called Gamma, is the brainchild of former Apple Music Global Creative Director Larry Jackson and veteran music executive Ike Youssef. It positions itself as an alternative to traditional record labels, according to Reuters.

Gamma says it will support content creation including music, video and podcasts, and provide audio and video distribution through Vydia, a company it acquired in December 2022.

Meanwhile, Spotify Technology said on Wednesday it crossed 500 million monthly active listeners, Reuters reports. The Swedish company will roll out new features like smart shuffle and previews of podcasts and music playlists on its audio streaming platform and announce a new user interface at its annual Stream On event.

Slice, an Indian fintech unicorn, acquired a 5 percent stake in North East Small Finance, a Guwahati-headquartered small finance bank, in September, for $3.42 million, TechCrunch reports, citing a regulatory filing.

Slice, privately valued at $1.55 billion, counts Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Blume Ventures and Axis Bank among its investors.

Staying on the topic of startups, and looking specifically at women-led ventures, meaning startups with at least one woman among the founders, data from Tracxn shows that almost one in five of all funded startups in India is now a woman-led startup.

Funded startups in India with woman founders and co-founders accounted for 18 percent of all funded ventures in 2022. Overall, women-led startups accounted for 8.3 percent of all startups in India, according to Tracxn, a Mumbai-listed private markets intelligence provider.

The number of active investors investing in women-led startups has seen a steady increase since 2010, with a sharp year-on-year jump of 42 percent in 2021 – which was also a year in which funding went a bit crazy, overall.

However, a significant data point seems to be that funding for women-led startups declined by only 11 percent in 2022 versus 2021, compared with a 37 percent drop for the overall startup ecosystem in the same period, according to Tracxn.

And, the share of funding garnered by women-led startups, as a percentage of overall total funding, increased to 16 percent in 2022 from 11 percent in 2021.

If one looks at a funding-stage-by-funding-stage breakdown as well, women-led startups have outperformed the overall Indian startup ecosystem in 2022, according to Tracxn.

Out of the approximately 2,200 women-led startups in India that have received funding, 36 percent have progressed to the Series A stage, and 24 percent have gone on to the Series D stage or beyond.