This week was a wake-up call for India’s startup ecosystem, with Piyush Goyal making it painfully clear: India remains a distant third, trailing behind China and the States. Here's a breakdown of everything that went down in FY26 Q1 W2: A standee at Startup Mahakumbh 2025 quickly became a flashpoint for debate by drawing side-by-side comparisons of what 🔴 Indian and 🟢 Chinese startups are doing. Let’s take a look at each claim.

In 2019 Orangewood Labs had $20K in credit card debt, they’d laid off most of their employees, and the founders were evicted from their flat because they couldn’t make rent.

Five years later they’re one of the hottest Indian robotics startups in the world. Here’s their story 🧵 2/25 In late 2008, Abhinav Das (@Abhindas1) was in the middle of the GATE exam when he realised that he didn’t actually want to do a master’s. Instead, he drafted a business plan, penning a name for his company at the top of the exam paper: ‘Evomo - Evolving Mobility’.

If you had visited the Robotics Lab at IIT Madras at night in 2013, there’s a good chance you would have tripped over Swapnil Jain or Tarun Mehta asleep on the floor. A decade later, both own beds and have defined India’s electric two wheeler industry. This is their story 🧵 2/45 Swapnil Jain came up with the name Ather Energy in 2009. Ather is a respelling of the classical element Aether, the purest form of energy. At the time, Swapnil was working on a unique project that he called the Famp, i.e. a fan powered by heat from oil lamps.

Successful hardware startups in India are rare. Without a preexisting ecosystem like China’s, Indian tech businesses are forced to import white-labelled products or spend years in R&D to build something from scratch. This is the story of one company that did the latter 🧵 2/25 Jyotiranjan Harichandan and Mohit Yadav were on a motorcycle road trip in 2015 when they made an obvious yet life-changing observation: two wheelers hadn’t changed much since the 1970s. Nearly all of India’s scooters and bikes had similarly uninspired, analogue dashboards.

Nicolas Grossemy left his home country of France to write his master’s dissertation on Indian startups. Then, in 2014, he created one of his own. In a Matador van.

Now he runs a profitable, bootstrapped, 12-location restaurant business in Bengaluru. Here’s his story 🧵 2/17 Nicolas and his French co-founders initially wanted to open a French bistro but Bengaluru landlords weren’t interested, worrying he would leave India unexpectedly. Undeterred, at age 22 Nicolas decided that if he couldn’t rent a restaurant, he would build one on wheels.

1/25 Matt Chitharanjan came to India in 2011 expecting to spend a year in Chennai before returning to his home country, the United States. Instead, India became his home; he spent the next 12 years building India’s first specialty coffee brand, Blue Tokai. Here’s his story 🧵 2/25 Second wave coffee began in India with Café Coffee Day in 1996. Barista followed in 2000, and Costa Coffee was the first international coffee brand to enter the Indian market in 2005. This was the state of India’s branded coffee segment in 2011 when Matt arrived in India.

When Bert Mueller visited India in 2010 he never could have imagined that he’d spend the next decade of his life here.

Today he runs a profitable 50+ location QSR chain called California Burrito - they bring in ₹110+ crore annually. Here's how it happened 🧵 2/15 Bert started California Burrito with two American co-founders, Dharam Khalsa and Gaelan Draper. They each put in $15,000, and were able to raise an additional $250,000 from family and friends using a Tumblr blog which documented their startup’s journey.

Did a deep dive into the very early years of BYJU'S recently and made some interesting discoveries 🧵 2/10 Byju Raveendran dipped his toes in edtech as early as 2009 with his business's first website, Noesis. Noesis is a philosophical term in Greek philosophy referring to the activity of the intellect. On this site, Byju describes himself as zealous, extraordinary, and peerless.

Awais Ahmed (@awaisahmedna) is one of India’s brightest and most ambitious entrepreneurs. His startup Pixxel has multiple satellites in space beaming terabytes of hyperspectral imagery down to Earth every day. Here’s why you should be paying attention to him 🧵 2/10 He was a founding member of the Hyperloop India project, which designed and manufactured a Hyperloop pod vehicle. Out of 2,500 teams, his team was selected as the only Indian finalist in SpaceX’s Hyperloop competition.