Bengaluru startups gave birth to most of India's young billionaires
3 min read 21 Dec 2019, 08:38 AM ISTBengaluru has been crowned India's millennial billionaire’s capital in the Hurun India Rich ListBengaluru startup founders like Zerodha's Kamath brothers and Flipkart co-founders Sachin and Binny Bansal are among the richest
PremiumNEW DELHI : Bengaluru, India's start-up capital, now also holds the distinction of being home to the most number of billionaires aged under 40. Hurun India Rich List 2019 has released a list of top 17 self-made entrepreneurs out of which a majority of 10 are from Bengaluru alone. While Mumbai registered the most number of billionaires across ages, Bengaluru, led by Zerodha's Nithin Kamath and Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal, became the millennial billionaire’s hub.
Bengaluru's richest startup founders:
1) The richest in the young billionaires list from Bengaluru is Nithin Kamath, founder and CEO of discount brokerage startup Zerodha. He is just 39-year-old and his net worth has been estimated to be ₹6,600 crore. Founded in 2010, Zerodha now contributes to almost 15% of the Indian retail trading volume and is India's largest retail stockbroker with a customer base of more than 1.5 million.
Kamath started trading from his college days and even worked as a telemarketing executive in a call centre for three years before hitting the bull's eye with Zerodha.
2) Flipkart co-founders Sachin Bansal ( ₹6,100 crore) and Binny Bansal ( ₹5,500 crore) are next on the rich list. Both had left their cushy jobs at Amazon to build India's largest e-commerce site and most valued start-up Flipkart. Last year, Walmart had bought a 77% stake in Flipkart for $16 billion.
Sachin Bansal had sold his 5.5-6% stake for roughly $1 billion. Binny's stake, on the other hand, was estimated to be worth $700-800 million in Flipkart last year. Since then, he has been offloading his stake in tranches to other investors.
3) With a net worth of ₹4,400 crore, Nitin Kamath's brother Nikhil has been found to be the fourth most richest young man in Bengaluru. “Bangalore’s thriving tech ecosystem can be attributed to the rise of the ‘millennial entrepreneur’. Bangalore has an appetite for taking business risks, testing new ideas, and executing them with great success," Nikhil Kamath, co-founder and CIO of True Beacon and Zerodha, told Livemint. He said it is no surprise that Bengaluru is home to a plethora of successful technology based businesses.
4) Online tutoring app BYJU's co-founder Riju Ravindran's wealth has been estimated to be ₹3,600 crore. The Bengaluru-based startup, a unit of Think & Learn Pvt Ltd, was valued around $5.5 billion in July.
BYJU's another co-founder Divya Gokulnath, wife of Byju Ravindran, is also on the richie rich list as she is estimated to have made ₹1,800 crore.
5) Former Flipkart executives Amod Malviya, Sujeet Kumar and Vaibhav Gupta, who propelled online B2B marketplace Udaan to the fastest Indian startup to achieve unicorn status, are also among Bengaluru's richest club under 40. Their net worth has been estimated to be ₹3,500 crore each. Their startup is now valued at $2.5-3 billion.
6) The net worth of 34-year-old Bhavish Aggarwal, who runs the popular ride-hailing service Ola, is estimated to be ₹3,100 crore. The IIT-Bombay BTech engineer left his lucrative job at Microsoft after working for two years to launch his own company ANI Technologies in 2010, which has quickly grown to be India's most valued startups.
Ola's another co-founder and CTO Ankit Bhati's name also features in the rich list. His net worth is estimated to be around ₹1,400 crore.
7) All self-made entrepreneurs under 40 from the IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List 2019 derive their wealth from technology-based ventures. With a combined net worth of ₹40,000 crore, the average age of these self-made billionaires under 40 is 35. Their average wealth is ₹4,200 crore.
8) The youngest self-made entrepreneur under 40 is 25-year-old Ritesh Agarwal of Oyo Rooms, with a net worth of ₹7,500 crore. The wealthiest in the young billionaire's list, however, is Divyank Turakhia (37) of Media.net. He is based out of Dubai.
