Indian Immigrants Power America's Billion-Dollar Startup Boom
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New Delhi, June 5: Indian-origin entrepreneurs have become the largest group of immigrant founders in the United States' unicorn ecosystem. According to a study by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), immigrants from India have founded 96 US-based companies valued at over $1 billion.
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The study found that Indian founders account for more than 20 percent of all immigrant-founded unicorns in the United States. India ranks first, followed by Israel with 60 unicorns, the United Kingdom with 47, China with 41, and Canada with 30.
The report highlights the important role immigrants play in driving innovation and economic growth in the United States. Many of these entrepreneurs arrived through different immigration pathways, including family-sponsored immigration, refugee programs, and employment-based visas such as the H-1B visa.
NFAP identified 455 immigrant-founded unicorn companies in the United States with a combined value of nearly $5 trillion. This value is greater than the total stock market capitalization of companies in most countries around the world. The growth has been remarkable, as the combined valuation of these companies was only $168 billion in 2016.
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Some of the most valuable immigrant-founded companies include SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, Stripe, Perplexity, Epic Games, Chobani, and Miro.
The study also noted that several immigrant-founded startups have successfully become publicly traded companies. Examples include Palantir, Uber, CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, Robinhood, Zoom Video, Moderna, Nutanix, Instacart, Rubrik, and ServiceTitan.
NFAP identified at least 15 entrepreneurs who have founded two or more billion-dollar companies. Six of them were born in India, including Mohit Aron, Jyoti Bansal, Ashutosh Garg, Arvind Jain, Sachin Nayyar, and Ajeet Singh.
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These companies are also major employers. On average, each immigrant-founded unicorn employs around 833 people. SpaceX leads with about 25,700 employees, followed by companies such as Stripe, Databricks, Deel, Cohesity, and OpenAI.
The report further found that immigrants are not only founders but also hold important leadership positions in many successful companies. In addition to the 455 immigrant-founded unicorns, NFAP identified 158 other billion-dollar US companies where immigrants serve as chief executives, chief technology officers, or senior engineering leaders.
Overall, immigrants hold founding or senior leadership roles in 613 of the 775 billion-dollar companies operating in the United States. This means immigrants are involved in nearly 79 percent of the country's unicorn ecosystem, demonstrating their significant contribution to American innovation, job creation, and economic development.