The Indus Valley Report 2024 - 3rd edition is here!! 🎉 This report is our take on India and the Indian startup ecosystem, through different lenses to sensemake what we call as “Indus Valley” - a catch-all moniker for the Indian startup ecosystem Here are 15 lenses or frames…

The report is 132 slides, broadly divided into two sections, India and Indus Valley, and about thirteen different subsections, each covering a different part of India's story. Report link at the end of the thread

1. The duality or paradox of India has always been how two opposite things can be true at the same time. You could be the 5th largest economy in the world and at the same time be 140th in terms of GDP per capita. We see this duality in a lot of different places throughout the…

2. Out of a 1.4 billion population, only about 0.3% contribute to 80% of the income tax collected. In the report, we explain how it contributes to high government borrowing as it spends to compensate for low corporate borrowing & investments into fixed capital (GFCF)

3. This also brings us to how Blume looks at the Indian consumer segment. India 1, 2 and 3 - the 3 countries that exist in India, seem to be one mental model to understand India, where India 1 is mostly driving the economy and is the main consuming class

4. The Rule of 30 and why we at Blume believe the outer limit of the Indian consuming class is ~30m households, about 10% of the total number of Indian households!

6. The rise of personal loans has been one of the key themes of the Indian economy and how small ticket loans have grown 31x in the last 5 years. We try to unpack what is happening in personal loans and why RBI is worried.

7. India’s story is incomplete if we don't talk about its IT sector and how it has been powering the Indian economy, it also relates to how in many ways India exports its people, services and culture to the entire world.

8. A key development and observation over the last 15 years is India’s emergence as a digital welfare state, leveraging digital public infrastructure (DPI) to reach every person in the country and also how DPI has been a key driver for Indian startups.

9. Now to Indus Valley. Now, it’s no surprise that funding has gone down over the last couple of years. Here is how it stacks up.

10. When we drill down, we find it is late-stage funding that has led to the decline, where both investors and founders are playing a wait-and-watch game.

11. One big learning while making this report has been how different China vs Indian private markets have been, how Indian PE markets punch above their weight in comparison to China and how it is a function of delivered exits and public investor’s appetite.

12. One interesting angle on the SME IPOs is that they have continuously outperformed the main board over the last few years.

13. A key theme in the Indian startup ecosystem of late has been the rise of Digital Native Brands, which have been growing steadily over the last few years and beginning to create their playbooks of international as well as domestic expansion.

14. Fintech has leveraged UPI to grow rapidly, right from having a majority market share in retail broking to leading access to credit for underserved customers in India.

15. Indian startups are also creating a distinct monetisation playbook, by enabling microtransactions, or subscriptions built on top of UPI Autopay, when very few believed that Indian customers would pay or that the only way to monetise was via ads.

This is only a small glimpse of the whole report. You can access the Indus Valley Annual Report 2024 at If you enjoyed reading it, then please do share it forward if you liked it, and of course, feel free to tweet or post about it.

Thanks from team IVAR @sajithpai @llnachull @anurag_pagaria , and we have a small surprise coming your way very soon. So stay tuned!

If you are more into listening rather than reading or want a companion guide to understand the report better. 90 mins of us taking you through each section and our thought process behind it

@anurag_pagaria Thank you for the awesome content. Why has FII investment slowed down in India given the bullish sentiment in the country and also how well the stock market has been performing?

@RDPandole Thanks for the kind words. Two things have happened at the same time, FII saw a slowdown/pullback because of interest rates rising and investors putting in money in safer assets and at the same time DII on the back of Mutual funds becoming bigger and bigger year over year.…

@anurag_pagaria Also, if Domestic Institutional Investors and FII ownership in BSE500 is 9.1% and 18.1% respectively, who owns the rest? Thank you!

@RDPandole So it is a mix of DII, FII, Retail, Promoters, HNIs, QIBs, PE, VCs etc which all adds up to 100%