In an indication of the role played by Indian immigrants in the US innovation ecosystem, India has emerged as the single largest source country for immigrant founders of US unicorns (billion-dollar startups). Indian immigrants founded or co-founded 96 US unicorns, the highest for any country. Israel ranks second with 60, followed by the UK with 47 and China with 41, according to a new National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) analysis.

However, despite its outsized representation, American unicorns founded by Indian immigrants are not playing in the big leagues yet as Indian immigrants seem to have taken to entrepreneurship only in recent years.

Perplexity, founded by Aravind Srinivas just over three years ago, is the highest-valued US unicorn founded by an Indian at $20 billion. It ranks as the 12th biggest unicorn by valuation. The majority of the 96 start-ups founded by Indians are valued below $10 billion.

The US billion-dollar companies with at least one immigrant founder with the highest valuations are SpaceX ($1.5 trillion), Anthropic ($965 billion), OpenAI ($852 billion), Databricks ($134 billion), and Stripe ($106.7 billion), among others.

Prasanna Sankar (Rippling), Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta (Skild AI), Mohit Aron (Cohesity), Prabhakar Reddy and Raghu Yarlagadda (FalconX) and Manu Kumar (Carta) are among the founders of other top US unicorns founded by Indians, as per NFAP.

Indians feature prominently among founders who first arrived in the US as international students. There are 76 Indians who came to the US as international students and founded unicorns.

Experts note that the social construct of Indians immigrating to the US is such that they aim for a stable job rather than start a risky venture. The natural trait of the non-entrepreneurial Indian middle class is to be great employees and executives, they add.

“Given the relatively humble backgrounds Indians grew up in (in their home countries), they are less likely to “shoot for the stars” like an Elon Musk would do. However, serial entrepreneurs of Indian-origin, especially those that are well set financially after exiting their first ventures, are often more ambitious and more successful in terms of scale and impact,” Arun Natarajan, founder and MD, Venture Intelligence, said.

Further, as a percentage of immigrants, the number of unicorns founded by Indians is lower than that of other countries given that employer-sponsored visas like H-1Bs make it more cumbersome for Indians to start up and run ventures.

But Thillai Rajan, IIT-M professor and Head of Centre for Research on Start-Ups, says that even when the number of unicorn founders is seen on a per capita basis, India would rank higher than China, another major immigrant group in the US. “The reason I believe is that India and Indians are traditionally more entrepreneurial as compared to the Chinese,” he said.

Overall, immigrants have founded or co-founded 59 per cent (455 out of 775) of America’s privately held startup companies valued at $1 billion or more, the NFAP report shows.

“The collective value of the 455 immigrant-founded billion-dollar companies is $5 trillion, which is more than the total market value of companies listed on stock markets in all but 7 countries, including the UK and Germany, and a demonstration of the wealth-creating power of immigrants,” NFAP said in its research.

Published on June 5, 2026