
◆ THE IVL MANIFESTO
India has the data.
The ecosystem deserves
the intelligence.
An open intelligence platform for the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem.
24,557
Startups verified
367
Investors mapped
108
Reports / yr
80+
Industries
◆ OPENING NARRATIVE
Three people who will never meet.
Priya is six months into building her company. She is drowning. Not in the work itself, but in the noise surrounding it. Legal counsel from one platform contradicts the founder Slack channel, which contradicts Rohan’s YouTube tutorial, which contradicts everything she needs to evaluate herself honestly. The fragmented advice is scattered across a dozen surfaces, none of which are organised around the question she is actually trying to answer.
Rohan, a second-time founder in Kochi, just announced a startup. He wants to help his team scale, clearly and without sounding patronising. So he goes looking for what the ecosystem actually looks like — who is building what, what companies are out there, what benchmarks are reasonable. He finds rankings written by publications, directories assembled by competitors, articles that describe the headline news but don’t show the patterns underneath. None of it is built for him. He can’t see the forest for the trees.
Aanya is reviewing her pipeline against her firm’s mandate. She knows hundreds of companies are raising capital, but she lacks a clear view of which investors her firm respects are concentrating in the sectors she is interested in, where capital is flowing this quarter vs. last, or which of the founders pitching her already pitched eight other firms in the previous fortnight. The picture she builds from press releases and paid databases is incomplete. She knows it. She works around it.
Priya, Rohan and Aanya don’t know each other. They have never met. But they are all hungry for the same intelligence about the same ecosystem.
◆ WHERE WE STAND
Indian venture in 2026 is unrecognisable
from what it was a decade ago.
The country has the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem by company count, behind only the United States and China. Funding deployed into Indian startups in 2025 reached approximately $11 billion across 936 disclosed deals, with VC fundraising itself nearly doubling year-on-year. The Government of India’s Fund of Funds for AI and deeptech has committed over ₹9,000 crore. There are 127 unicorns and over 150 soonicorns.
These are the headline numbers. They describe scale. What they don’t describe is the ecosystem’s increasing sophistication — and that is the more important shift. A decade ago, foreign investors deployed the majority of capital. Today, domestic family offices, sovereign wealth funds, and Indian-headquartered VCs play significant and often leading roles. A decade ago, exits were events; in 2025, multiple billion-dollar IPOs cleared the public markets. A decade ago, the ecosystem was concentrated in three metros; today, Hyderabad, Pune, Jaipur, Indore, and Coimbatore are producing startup activity at structural scale.
And yet, the analytical infrastructure that supports this ecosystem has not kept pace.
More data about Indian venture than at any point in history. Less coherent intelligence per dollar deployed than in any comparable major venture market.
Coverage is fragmented across dozens of platforms, publications, and government bodies. Where coverage exists, it is paywalled behind enterprise pricing. Where coverage is free, it is typically incomplete, undated, or presented without methodology. The ecosystem produces vast amounts of data about itself but cannot easily understand itself.
Founders rely on anecdote. Investors rely on press releases. Policymakers rely on whichever platform ranks first in a search engine. The general public relies on top-line statistics.
The intelligence layer Indian venture deserves does not exist.
We are building it, and we keep building it. Every six months the picture refreshes. Every year the depth we publish gets deeper. This is a long-term project. The ecosystem is itself a long-term project.
◆ THE QUESTIONS PEOPLE ALREADY ASK
The questions people ask
are the questions that drive the ecosystem.
Some are practical. Some aspirational. Some are asked at three in the morning when the company is still unincorporated. The platform is organised around them — because they are how the ecosystem actually engages.
“Where can I learn about Indian startups without paying enterprise prices?”
Our reports and dashboards are openly accessible. No paywall on public intelligence. Ever.
“Which sectors in India are getting funded right now?”
Live, structured sector dashboards refreshed nightly — not just headlines, the underlying flows.
“How do I know if my idea has any chance, or if it has already been done?”
Comparable Startups across sector, stage, geography. Surface what already exists before you raise.
“Where can I practise my pitch before I face real investors?”
Pitch Lab — a simulated investor environment with 45 AI personas across 8 deck formats.
“Can I just ask questions about my startup and get useful answers?”
Ask the Sage — an AI advisor that engages with the structured context of your startup.
◆ WHAT WE ARE
Indian Venture Labs is the
intelligence layer of India’s venture ecosystem.
We organise the intelligence the ecosystem already produces — by structuring it, scoring it, contextualising it, and delivering it to the people who can use it. This sounds simple in principle. In practice, it has taken years of work.
An open intelligence layer. For everyone curious about Indian venture. A long-term project.
We don’t just publish data; we are building a system that is citable, meaningful, and open. The platform exposes the surfaces we have built — the working components of the intelligence layer. The list will grow. The principles underneath will not.
◆ WHO WE ARE BUILDING FOR
Four audiences.
One intelligence. Four lenses.
Each encounters the platform calibrated to their questions, without the others getting in the way.
The Curious
An entrepreneurship student. A journalist. Anyone curious about the Indian startup ecosystem.
The Analyst
An analyst at a fund, a think tank, or a government body — mapping industry trends, identifying patterns.
The Founder
The entrepreneur building their company. Someone at this moment: pitching a round, scaling their team, or comparing themselves to others.
The Investor
The partner at a venture fund, family offices, sovereign wealth funds — mapping the landscape, identifying opportunities, assessing risk.
◆ WHAT WE HOLD OURSELVES TO
Three commitments.
Non-negotiable.
A platform like this lives or dies on credibility. We publish these here, in this manifesto, to be held accountable to them.
◆ 01
Methodology-disclosed, calibrated against the live database
Every coverage figure is calibrated against the actual database, not aspirational metrics. When data is missing, we say so. When it is estimated, we label it. When it is wrong, we correct it publicly and without delay.
◆ 02
Methodology where it earns trust
Where exposing methodology would let the system be reverse-engineered or gamed, we keep it confidential. Where methodology is not confidential — like our scoring engine — we will publish it. Trust is transparency where transparency does not destroy the work.
◆ 03
Accessible by design
Public reports stay free. Public dashboards stay free. The directory, the glossary, the news layer — free, forever. We charge for AI compute and proprietary intelligence, not for access to the truth about Indian startups.
◆ ◆ THE FOUNDING TEAM
The people behind
the platform.
Three founders. A wider village. And a market that had been waiting, without knowing it was waiting, for exactly this.
Thiru Pendyala
Co-Founder
Chief Operating Officer
Vijayawada, India
Built his career turning strategy into execution at scale — from leading 120-person sales teams to managing international client operations across four continents. He understands what it takes to keep a company moving when the vision is clear but the road is not. At IVL, he is the operating backbone.
Shelvin Narayan
Co-Founder
Product & Strategy
Sydney, Australia
Twenty-five years across insurance, cybersecurity, finance, and technology — working across Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Asian markets. Shapes what IVL builds and why: product architecture, strategic direction, and the intelligence frameworks that define the platform. He watched India’s ecosystem grow from international markets and decided to bring that outside perspective in.
Sai Ram Yadav
Co-Founder
Finance & Compliance
Hyderabad, India
Fourteen years building financial systems for businesses across India, the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia. Founder of Expanovate Consulting Services. He has seen enough businesses up close to know that the ones that last are built on rigour, not optimism alone. At IVL, he holds the financial and compliance architecture that lets everything else move with confidence.
Every ecosystem is, underneath its data and its deals, a human story. We are grateful to everyone who has been part of ours.
— Indian Venture Labs · Founding Document · May 2026
◆ WHY NOW
The intelligence layer
is being built now.
The analytical infrastructure that supports the Indian venture ecosystem can no longer be optional. The ecosystem is too large, the capital too significant, the participants too sophisticated, and the public interest too broad for the current state of intelligence to remain adequate.
The first generation of Indian VCs operated on conviction, networks, and pattern recognition built from limited data. The current generation operates at a level of analytical rigour that demands more. The infrastructure to support that professionalisation has not kept pace with the people doing the work.
Anyone who attempts to build an intelligence layer for Indian venture later will be operating in a market that has already been organised by whoever built it first. The asymmetry of being early is the structural reason platforms like Bloomberg in finance and Crunchbase in global venture occupy near-monopoly positions in their domains.
And it is being built in India. By people who understand what is missing because they have been the ones missing it.
◆ FROM THIS DOCUMENT TO YOUR ACCESS
Four ways to engage
with the work.
On its actual terms.
01
If you are curious
Discover the data. Explore the ecosystem. Share knowledge.
Continue
02
If you are building
Tools for discovery, benchmarking, and competitive analysis.
Continue
03
If you are a founder
Gain insights. Practise your pitch. Prepare for the fundraise.
Continue
04
If you are an investor
Understand the market. Identify opportunities. Manage risk.
Continue
This is what we built.
Welcome to Indian Venture Labs.
SIGNED
Sai Ram · Shelvin · Thiru Pendyala
For founders, with the ecosystem in mind.
Indian Venture Labs · Hyderabad · Launch Edition, 6 May 2026
Read our story →