(The Weekend Insight) - From Flipkart to Razorpay: How India’s Founder Networks Were Built

Thousands of startups have been built in India. But look at who funds them, where their founders worked, who makes the introductions and who backs the next generation, and the venture-funded part of the ecosystem begins to look considerably smaller. Let’s find out!

When Razorpay announced its early funding in October 2015, its investor list offered an interesting snapshot of the Indian startup ecosystem at the time.

Alongside Matrix Partners and Y Combinator were 33 angel investors. Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal had invested. So, had FreeCharge founders Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon, InMobi founders Naveen Tewari, Amit Gupta and Abhay Singhal, and Flipkart's then chief product officer Punit Soni.

Razorpay was still a young payments company. Most of the people backing it had already spent years building some of India's better-known internet businesses. They had money to invest, but they also brought something more useful to an early-stage company: credibility, introductions, hiring networks and experience.

Eleven years later, Razorpay occupies the other side of that relationship. By March 2026, 39 founders had emerged from the company and started businesses of their own, according to data analysed by Longhouse Consulting. Some of its founders and senior executives have also become investors.

The company that once benefited from India's first generation of startup networks is now creating another one.

This is becoming a fairly common pattern.

India had more than 2.23 lakh DPIIT-recognised startups by March 2026. Entrepreneurship itself is obviously too large and scattered to be controlled by a small group of people. Most Indian businesses never raise venture capital and have little contact with the founders, investors and institutions that dominate startup headlines.

But narrow the universe to companies that raise institutional capital, become large enough to create substantial employee wealth and eventually produce another generation of venture-backed founders, and the network becomes much tighter.

The same companies keep appearing in people's employment histories. The same founders become angel investors. Former employees raise money from people who backed their previous employers. Successful entrepreneurs become limited partners, fund managers, board members and members of industry committees.

Over time, money, experience and trust start travelling along many of the same routes.

How the founder family trees formed

Flipkart was probably India's earliest large-scale example of this process.

An Inc42 exercise conducted almost a decade ago counted 233 former Flipkart employees who had become founders and more than 207 startups created by Flipkart alumni. It also identified at least 49 businesses that had received backing from Flipkart, its founders or current and former employees.

The exact number today matters less than the companies that emerged from that network.

Amod Malviya, Sujeet Kumar and Vaibhav Gupta went on to build Udaan. Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari became the founders behind PhonePe. Lalit Keshre, Harsh Jain, Neeraj Singh and Ishan Bansal built Groww. Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori built Cure.fit, after which Nagori went on to start Curefoods.

These were technically first-time founders in their new companies, but they were hardly entering entrepreneurship without preparation.

They had seen Flipkart build logistics networks, payments systems, warehouses, customer support teams and technology operations while competing in a market that was still being created. They had watched the company hire thousands of people, raise large rounds of capital, negotiate acquisitions and survive periods when investors changed their view of Indian ecommerce.

When some of them decided to start companies, they already understood a good part of the venture-building process. They knew executives who could join them. They knew investors. They knew recruiters and lawyers. They understood employee stock options and term sheets.

Investors also knew them.

That makes a practical difference during fundraising. A former Flipkart executive walking into a venture capital firm is usually easier to evaluate than somebody coming from a company the investors have never encountered. A partner may have invested in Flipkart, worked with the executive on a previous transaction or know somebody who can provide a reference.

The founder is still expected to build a convincing business, but the trust-building process starts from a different point.

Flipkart initially looked like an exception because very few Indian startups had become large enough to produce dozens of entrepreneurs. That has changed.

By March 2026, the second-generation startup cohort studied by Longhouse had produced around 360 startups. Freshworks had produced 51 founders. Zomato had also produced 51. Zoho and Snapdeal had each produced 41.

A newer group is following the same path. Razorpay had produced 39 founders, CRED 38, Meesho 27 and PhonePe 22. Across 111 newer high-growth companies analysed by Longhouse, 184 people had already gone on to become founders of around 203 startups.

Some of these networks now stretch across several generations.

Girish Mathrubootham spent years at Zoho before starting Freshworks. Freshworks then became a training ground for another set of entrepreneurs. Rocketlane's founders had previously built Konotor, sold it to Freshworks and worked inside the company before starting again. Arvind Parthiban spent years at Zoho, founded Zarget, sold it to Freshworks, worked there and later created SuperOps.

Mathrubootham eventually became an angel investor as well. Together Fund says he has personally backed more than 60 startups, while the venture fund he co-founded has more than 35 portfolio companies.

The chain therefore does not end when an employee leaves a successful company. The employee may become a founder, create wealth, invest in somebody else and eventually participate in a venture fund. Each stage creates another set of connections.

Flipkart's network offers similar examples. Ankit Nagori moved from Flipkart to Cure.fit and later Curefoods. Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal subsequently became a major Curefoods investor. His investment vehicle put another ₹160 crore into Curefoods in a pre-IPO placement in 2025.

This is how startup ecosystems mature. The people who learnt inside one company move out and build another. Some succeed, create equity wealth and finance others. Their companies then produce another group of executives capable of doing the same thing.

After 15 years, what looks like a collection of separate companies begins to resemble a set of overlapping family trees.

When founders become capital allocators

The money flowing through these networks has become substantial.

Kunal Shah made 249 angel investments in India between 2021 and June 2026, according to Venture Intelligence data reported by Moneycontrol. His portfolio has included Razorpay, Unacademy, Shiprocket, Udaan, Spinny, Zetwerk and BigBasket.

Titan Capital, created by Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, says it has backed more than 250 startups, including Razorpay, Ola, Urban Company, OfBusiness, Mamaearth and Shadowfax.

Zerodha's Rainmatter says it has invested more than ₹1,500 crore across over 160 startups since 2016.

Info Edge had deployed around ₹4,900 crore across 135 startups by June 2026. Those holdings were valued at roughly ₹41,300 crore, helped considerably by early investments in Zomato and Policybazaar.

These figures cannot simply be combined. Angel investments, corporate investment vehicles and venture funds operate differently, and their portfolios overlap. But the overlap itself is useful because it shows how often capital circulates through the same relationships.

Consider Razorpay again. Its 2015 investor list included Shah, Bahl, Bansal and several InMobi founders. Razorpay became a large fintech company and produced dozens of entrepreneurs. People associated with that company can now invest in another generation.

A successful startup therefore produces more than returns for its shareholders. It produces executives who understand how venture-backed companies operate, employees with equity wealth, founders with credibility and people who can later become investors themselves.

That accumulation is one reason startup pedigree has become increasingly valuable in India.

A Tracxn study reported in 2025 found that former startup executives who launched companies were three times more likely to raise seed funding than other founders. Operator-founded businesses raised $101 million in seed capital in 2024, up 243% from the previous year. Their average seed round between 2022 and 2024 was about $1.56 million, compared with $1.3 million for other startups.

There are good reasons for investors to value this experience.

Someone who has spent five years helping to scale Flipkart, Zomato, Razorpay or another large startup has probably made hiring mistakes, missed targets, dealt with competitors, watched products fail and participated in fundraising conversations. They may have managed teams through periods of rapid growth and cost-cutting.

That knowledge is difficult to learn from a business school or accelerator.

The difficulty is separating the value of experience from the value of access that usually comes with it.

In 2023, Stellaris Venture Partners said that 30 of the 38 companies it had backed over the previous six years had been started by people who had either previously founded or worked at a venture-funded company. Eleven were repeat entrepreneurs.

The concentration does not necessarily indicate favouritism. Venture capital is a business built around incomplete information. Investors have to decide whether to back people whose companies may have little revenue and whose projections can change within months. Under those conditions, references and reputation are useful.

A known operator therefore starts with an advantage that is partly about capability and partly about the investor's ability to verify that capability.

The pedigree advantage

India's IIT network shows how powerful these signals can become.

Between 2015 and 2024, alumni of the seven older IITs founded 4,153 startups in a Tracxn dataset analysed by The Economic Times. These companies represented only around 3.7% of the tech startups created during the period but attracted roughly $32.9 billion, close to 49% of the equity funding recorded in the dataset.

The difference in fundraising rates was similarly large. Only around 6.3% of the more than 113,000 tech startups in the wider dataset had raised equity capital. Among startups founded by alumni of the individual IITs studied, roughly 34% to 44% had raised money.

This does not mean IIT graduates automatically build better companies. The degree works partly because of what sits around it.

An IIT graduate begins with one network. Joining a successful venture-backed company adds another. Raising money from a well-known fund adds a third. If the company succeeds, ESOPs or a secondary sale may provide enough personal wealth to eventually start something new.

Each step makes the next one easier to reach.

None of this requires an organised inner circle. It can emerge through thousands of sensible individual decisions. A VC prefers someone whose work can be checked. A founder hires an executive they have previously worked with. An angel invests in a former colleague. A portfolio founder introduces another entrepreneur to the fund.

Taken individually, these choices are perfectly understandable. Together, they can produce a funding market in which credibility itself becomes inherited.

Employee wealth strengthens the effect.

Indian startup employees received about $423 million through 27 ESOP liquidity programmes in FY26, according to Qapita, up from $248 million the previous year. Flipkart's PhonePe separation in 2023 alone produced a payout of roughly $700 million involving around 19,000 current and former employees.

This money matters because starting a company requires personal runway before it requires venture capital.

An employee who has accumulated ₹50 lakh or ₹60 lakh in liquid wealth can afford to stop drawing a salary, put some initial money into a business and spend months testing an idea. Someone with the same ability but without those savings may have far less room to take the risk.

And if that wealth came from a successful startup, the person is also likely to know executives who can join, founders who can advise them and investors who will take a meeting.

ESOPs are therefore creating more than employee wealth. They are helping finance the next generation of entrepreneurship, although that entrepreneurship naturally emerges first from companies where substantial equity wealth already exists.

Silicon Valley has operated this way for decades. PayPal alumni went on to build or finance LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, Palantir, Tesla, SpaceX and several investment firms.

India now appears to have several smaller versions of that phenomenon rather than one dominant network. Flipkart, Zoho, Freshworks, Zomato, Snapdeal, Ola, Oyo, Razorpay, CRED, Meesho, Udaan and PhonePe have all produced founders, investors or both.

And these groups increasingly overlap.

When private networks reach public institutions

The influence of these networks becomes more complicated once successful founders move beyond angel investing.

Titan Capital is now an investment institution. Rainmatter operates as one. Together Fund is a venture capital firm. Info Edge has built several investment vehicles.

This gives founder networks a permanence they did not have when investing consisted mostly of personal angel cheques.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani is one example of how widely these roles can extend. Info Edge made early investments in Zomato and Policybazaar. Bikhchandani is also a nominee director at Eternal. He has served on the Venture Capital Investment Committee for SIDBI's Fund of Funds for Startups and is a member of the National Startup Advisory Council, among other industry positions.

There is a sensible explanation for this. If a government, board or investment committee wants people who understand startups, experienced founders and investors are natural candidates.

But the more the same people participate in entrepreneurship, venture capital, corporate boards and policy forums, the more important conflict-management becomes.

A report published by The Indian Express on August 7 brought that issue into view. The Technology Development Board had approved ₹2,192 crore of soft loans for 22 private companies in the first round of India's Research, Development and Innovation funding programme. The newspaper found that 15 of those 22 companies had investment or professional links to seven members of the selection committee. Those companies accounted for more than ₹1,377 crore, roughly 62% of the money approved.

The committee members said they had disclosed their interests and recused themselves where required. The government said selections were made on merit and that members with conflicts had no role in evaluating or sanctioning the relevant proposals. The report did not establish wrongdoing.

It nevertheless illustrates a practical problem that will become more common as India's startup ecosystem matures.

Deep-tech investing requires technical knowledge. The people with the most knowledge are often founders, investors or advisers who have spent years inside that market. They are therefore also more likely to have relationships with the companies seeking funding.

One committee member, responding to the newspaper, pointed out that India's deep-tech ecosystem is small.

That is precisely what makes governance difficult. The network provides expertise, but the same network can also create conflicts that need to be disclosed and managed carefully. Private investors can decide how comfortable they are with those overlaps. The standard has to be higher once taxpayer money is involved.

The part of networks that works

None of this means startup networks are inherently bad. They solve real problems.

People who have worked together for years have information about one another that cannot be extracted from a pitch deck. Investors can evaluate a founder more accurately when former colleagues are willing to provide detailed references. Companies can hire faster when founders know which executives handled difficult problems in previous businesses.

Academic research offers some support for this. A 2025 study of venture capital found that roughly one-third of deals involved a founder and investor who had attended the same university. Investments with an alumni connection were, on average, 18% larger, and the connected deals also produced better outcomes in the study. The researchers concluded that information advantages appeared to explain more of the effect than simple favouritism.

That is believable. Relationships can contain useful information.

The concern begins when relationships stop being one input into investment decisions and become the main route through which opportunities are discovered.

Consider two founders trying to raise the same ₹1 crore seed round.

One spent six years at Razorpay, has former CRED executives joining the company and can obtain introductions to several venture funds through previous colleagues.

The other worked at a ₹200 crore manufacturing company in Coimbatore. Their co-founder comes from Surat. They understand the industry well, but nobody at the major Bengaluru venture firms knows their previous employer. There is no well-known founder making the first introduction.

The second founder may eventually raise money. But the amount of evidence they must produce before receiving the same level of trust is likely to be higher.

This is an important distinction because Indian startup conversations spend a great deal of time discussing availability of capital. Availability of access receives much less attention.

Capital can exist in abundance while remaining difficult to reach for entrepreneurs who sit outside the established networks.

The advantage of a former Flipkart or Razorpay executive is therefore not simply that they have learnt more. They arrive with references, relationships and a history that investors can verify quickly.

Their credibility has been partly earned personally and partly inherited from the institutions around them.

Does the circle keep expanding?

India should want Flipkart, Zoho, Freshworks, Razorpay and other successful companies to keep producing founders. That is one of the clearest signs that the startup economy is becoming deeper.

The question is whether those networks continue creating new entrances or gradually become closed loops.

A healthy venture market should value somebody who spent six years at Razorpay because that experience is useful. It should still be capable of finding the founder who spent six years solving industrial problems in Rajkot.

An IIT education should remain a positive signal. It should not become a substitute for evaluating the business.

Founder-angels should keep backing people whose abilities they have seen closely. At the same time, the venture market needs enough investors willing to spend time on founders who arrive without a familiar introduction.

India already has more than two lakh recognised startups. It does not have a shortage of people attempting entrepreneurship. What may be much scarcer are reliable pathways into the smaller part of the market where venture capital, influential investors and reputational advantages accumulate.

It would be useful to measure that concentration properly.

Instead of another ranking of unicorns, we could map which Indian companies have produced the most founders, which founders have invested in the largest number of startups, how frequently investors back executives from their own portfolio companies and how many prominent startups can be connected through one or two professional relationships.

We could also look at which founder-investors connect otherwise separate networks, how often former bosses invest in former employees and how concentrated startup board memberships have become.

Perhaps the network is less concentrated than it appears. India is large enough for that to be possible.

But the direction is becoming clear. The startup ecosystem now has a history, and that history affects who enters the next cycle with money, knowledge and credibility already accumulated.

A former Flipkart executive carries lessons learnt during the building of Flipkart. A former Freshworks employee inherits part of its SaaS network. Someone who spent years at Razorpay enters fintech entrepreneurship with relationships that did not exist when Razorpay's own founders were starting out.

When former employers and well-known founders then invest in these businesses, that accumulated reputation becomes visible on the cap table.

For most of the past decade, this recycling of people, capital and experience has been good for Indian startups. It has made the ecosystem more competent and given ambitious employees examples of people who left successful companies and built their own.

The next stage is harder.

As these networks become wealthier and more institutionalised, India will have to ensure that they remain useful shortcuts for identifying good founders rather than barriers that make unfamiliar founders harder to discover.

That is the distinction that will matter.

The country has spent the last 15 years creating a startup establishment. Its founders now invest, their employees become founders, their investors back those employees and some of the same people participate in boards, funds and policy institutions.

There is nothing unusual about that. Mature business ecosystems almost always develop this way.

The test is whether success keeps widening the number of people who can enter the network, or whether the benefits increasingly circulate among people who are already one introduction away from it.