India-Led Startup20 Pitches For $1 Tn Global Annual Startup Investments By 2030

Echoing India’s sentiments, the Startup20 Engagement Group has reportedly urged the G20 nations to ramp up annual investments in the global startup ecosystem to $1 Tn by 2030. 

While releasing the final policy communique on Monday (July 3), the group called for realising the target by facilitating the flow of public and private capital and making venture debt products more accessible to budding entrepreneurs across the globe. 

The multinational pitch materialised at the two-day Startup20 Shikhar summit in Gurugram, which commenced on July 3. The deliberations were attended by big-ticket Indian startups such as Paytm, MakeMyTrip and UpGrad, along with VC firms such as Blume Ventures and Avendus Capital.

This comes nearly a week after Startup20 India chair Chintan Vaishnav publicly said that India was looking to push the G20 member countries to raise their annual global investments in startups to the $1 Tn mark.

The G20 nations also pitched for improving access to capital via flexible funding options, cross-border listing and financial literacy. Besides, it also called for crafting policies to incentivise large enterprises co-working with startups to build solutions, and to set up an institution to incubate budding platforms.

The debate around corporate governance also echoed at the summit. The engagement group batted for a self-regulation approach for startups to deal with the rising cases of corporate misgovernance at startups. 

“Financial propriety and governance are very important and startups must focus on self-regulating,” India’s G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant said as per Bloomberg Quint. 

The group also unveiled a governance framework for startups, designed in consultation with industry experts and other stakeholders. As per the communique, the policy will equip the startups with a practical guide for adhering to corporate governance and financial management best practices.

It pitched developing common minimum G20 startup accounting standards, due-diligence norms and governance standards to further ramp up cross-border investments. 

Backing India’s pitch, the Startup20 group also built consensus on a five-pronged framework for defining startups across aspects, namely legal status, age, size, scalability and innovation. 

While much has been outlined on paper, the on-ground implementation could see slight hiccups. However, despite the challenges, India continues to embolden its pitch for pushing startups. Startups are a major policy area of the country’s G20 presidency and India’s plans to use the G20 stage to tout its own startup ecosystem. 

Buoyed by government initiatives such as Startup India and fund of funds as well as the growing digital economy, the homegrown startup ecosystem has emerged as the world’s third biggest. This growth has spurred the rise of more than 1 Lakh DPIIT-recognised startups and 108 unicorns.