Why India is winning global entrepreneurial talent

This article is authored by Richa Bajpai, CEO, Campus Fund.

For a long time, the Indian founder journey followed a fairly predictable geography. You studied in India, went abroad for Masters and stayed back for a few years, built your network, raised capital, and often incorporated your company somewhere else. India was where you came from. The US, UK or Singapore was where you built.

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That equation is changing.

More Indian students and young professionals who have studied and worked abroad are choosing to return and build companies here. But there is another, perhaps even more interesting, signal emerging. India is also beginning to attract founders who are not Indian. Take Adrian Schmidt, the German co-founder of Bengaluru-based Sarla Aviation, who chose India to build an electric air mobility company. The question, therefore, is becoming larger than brain gain. What has changed enough for founders, Indian or otherwise, to see India as a credible place to build from?

One of the biggest shifts is that risk capital has been domesticated. This is not simply about more money being available. The source of that money has changed. Indian AIFs, family offices, HNIs and domestic fund managers are now a meaningful part of the ecosystem. Estimates suggest domestic investors accounted for around 38-40% of venture capital deployed in India in 2025, the highest share on record. Indian wealth is now increasingly funding Indian risk.

Government support has changed too. Both the Centre and states increasingly see entrepreneurship, technology and manufacturing as strategic priorities. The ₹10,000 crore Startup India Fund of Funds 2.0 is one example, but it sits alongside a much wider capital architecture. SIDBI-backed funds, the ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation Fund, BIRAC programmes and initiatives in sectors such as space are creating different pools of capital for different kinds of innovation. Importantly, there is also greater recognition that deeptech and R&D cannot always be funded like conventional startups. They need patient capital, longer time horizons and, depending on the problem, instruments ranging from grants to long-term financing and equity.

This matters when you are building beyond the familiar software playbook. Space, semiconductors, climate technology and advanced manufacturing need an ecosystem around the founder. Policy and infrastructure can matter almost as much as venture capital.

Then there is AI.

For years, there was a genuine knowledge arbitrage between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world. The newest technology, research and tools often emerged there first. Today, a frontier model can become available to a developer in Bengaluru and San Francisco on the same day. The Valley still has enormous advantages in capital depth, distribution and networks. But it no longer has the same monopoly on know-how.

AI has changed two other things. First, the cost of building has fallen sharply. Small teams can now ship products that would previously have required much larger engineering and product organisations. Second, some of India's hardest markets are becoming commercially serviceable in ways they were not before. Vernacular users, voice-first consumers, lower-ARPU customers and users in Tier II and III India can increasingly be served with viable economics.

And that is where being in India becomes an advantage. You are close to the customer and to all the complexity of this market. An offshore team can study that complexity. A founder building here lives it. Some of the things that once made India difficult to build for may now become precisely what gives Indian founders an edge.

There is another shift I think is still underrated: The endgame has moved onshore.

For years, there was no sufficiently credible exit market in India for many venture-backed technology businesses. Incorporating in Delaware or Singapore often made sense because that was where deeper capital pools and eventual exits existed. That has changed substantially. Indian public markets are far more receptive to technology and consumer businesses today, and companies including PhonePe, Groww and Meesho have gone through the cost and complexity of moving their corporate structures back to India.

When the endgame comes home, incorporation follows. And eventually, founders do too.

Then there is talent. Ten years ago, a returning founder could come back with ambition and capital and still face a basic problem: who here had actually scaled something before? Who had built a large engineering organisation, managed hypergrowth or taken a product from thousands of users to millions?

Today, there is an operator bench. Alumni of Flipkart, Ola, Freshworks, Zerodha and dozens of other startups have gone on to become founders, senior operators, angels and mentors.

A founder building in India today can find people who have already made mistakes at scale and learnt from them. That was far less true a decade ago.

Visa restrictions and geopolitical uncertainty may now be pushing some Indian talent to make decisions sooner. But I would still call them an accelerant, not the cause. The push matters because the pull has become credible.

For the earlier generation of Indian founders, returning to India could feel like a trade-off. Today, it can be a strategic choice. And increasingly, India is becoming a choice even for founders who have no ancestral reason to be here. That, to me, is the more interesting shift.

The foundations are now in place for this advantage to compound further: deeper domestic pools of capital, more patient funding for frontier technologies, an experienced operator base, stronger public markets and a huge, complex home market that increasingly rewards those close enough to understand it.

The question is, therefore, no longer only, “Why should I come back?”

For the next generation of founders, wherever they come from, it may increasingly be: “Why not build from India?”

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Richa Bajpai, CEO, Campus Fund.