Indian tech start-ups raised around $7.2 billion in Q1 CY22, growing by nearly 34 per cent as compared to Q4 CY21. Around 81 per cent of this funding activity was driven by early and growth-stage deals, according to a report by the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), in association with PGA Labs.

About 76 per cent of the total deals in terms of volumes across 247 deals were of ticket sizes less than $25 million. The report specifically tracks deals across on five key verticalsm— fintech, edtech, retail tech, health-tech and enterprise-tech. Between January and March, around 54 per cent of the deals were in three specific verticals – Enterprise Tech, FinTech and EdTech.

Unicorn wave

Percentage of large funding rounds went down from 68 percent earlier to 58 per cent in Q1. This even as there were some significant funding rounds, including Swiggy raising $700 million, Polygon raising $450 million, Uniphore raised $400 million and ElasticRun raised $332 million.

The unicorn wave continues this quarter too, with 15 new unicorns reported this quarter, starting from Mamaearth, a D2C personal care and beauty brand which raised $52 million, led by Sequoia Capital. Seven out of 15 unicorns added in Q1 CY22 are from Enterprise tech, fintech and SCM & logistics. Retail tech accounted for 8 per cent of the total funding in Q1, while e-commerce sector raised $588 million in total funding.  Dealshare and Udaan raised $200 million each in Q1.