Tracxn: Indian startups raised $5.46B in H1 2023, down from $17.1B in H1 2022 and $13.4B in H1 2021; Tiger Global made just one deal while SoftBank made none
Manish Singh / TechCrunch : Twitter: @ulonnaya and @eliotwb Twitter: Tage / @ulonnaya : Several high-flying Indian startups, including Byju's, Swiggy and PharmEasy, have experienced a dramatic downward adjustment in their valuations. https://techcrunch.com/... Eliot Brown / @eliotwb : Good piece on how SoftBank and Tiger Global deluged Indian startups with money ... and now have shut the tap completely off https://techcrunch.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the midpoint of a decline that started well before H1 2023: Tracxn had already flagged a 57% QoQ drop in Q3 2022 funding, and the FT reported that foreign VC funding of Indian tech startups fell nearly 40% in 2022 as Tiger Global, SoftBank and Sequoia more than halved their activity. The H1 2023 numbers — $5.46B against $17.1B a year earlier — confirm the pullback deepened into a near-shutoff by the two most aggressive cross-border check-writers.
What makes the headline figures more than a volume story is the markdown wave underneath it: Byju's, Swiggy and PharmEasy have all taken significant downward valuation adjustments, meaning the capital that did flow is repricing the 2021 vintage rather than extending it. Tiger Global closing one deal and SoftBank closing none in the half is the sharpest single signal in the data.
First-order effects
- Late-stage Indian startups that scaled on 2021-22 capital — the cohort including Byju's, Swiggy and PharmEasy — now face a funding market roughly a third the size of the prior year's, with their largest foreign backers effectively absent.
Second-order effects
- With Tiger Global and SoftBank on the sidelines, the markdowns on marquee names become reference prices for the whole market, forcing other investors to underwrite new rounds at reset valuations or wait — which is why deal counts, not just dollars, compress.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, India's startup ecosystem resets to a smaller, more selective funding base: full-year 2023 came in around $7B, the lowest since 2018, and even the 2025 recovery to $10.5B remains far below the 2021-22 peak — a structurally lower plateau rather than a quick bounce.
The trend: Indian startup funding is normalizing off a foreign-capital-fueled 2021-22 peak, with the withdrawal of Tiger Global and SoftBank marking the shift from growth-at-any-cost to repriced, slower capital cycles.