India’s Startup Mafia 2.0: Oyo, Ola, Udaan spawn most number of entrepreneurs

Hundreds of former employees from some of India’s biggest unicorns who have left to start up on their own are creating a ripple wave of internet enterprise in what is now the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem.

Drawing on a record inflow of venture capital in the past decade, 297 founders have set up some 253 startups, igniting talk of a new-look “startup mafia,” as such cohorts of entrepreneurs are termed in industry parlance. These entrepreneurs, who have all raised venture funding, were earlier employed at companies such as Zomato, Zoho, Freshworks, Paytm, Citrus Pay, Snapdeal, Swiggy, Udaan, Oyo and Ola, according to data exclusively analysed by Longhouse Consulting for ET.