G20 To Finalise Common Startup Definition

While India is all set to host the G20 Summit this year in September, preliminary meetings are already underway. The country is preparing to talk about its initiative Startup20 during its presidency of the summit. Ahead of this summit, reportedly, an official group is going to finalise a common definition of ‘startup’ to harmonise the global startup ecosystem.

According to a Business Standard report, a government official, aware of the matter said, “We are going to collaboratively define startups uniformly across G20 countries. We have already had discussions on this twice. By the third meeting, it should be finalised.”

Per the official, two meetings have already been conducted on bringing the startup ecosystem of G20 nations under a regulatory framework. The idea is to define startups in a unified communique and get all the nations to agree to the same.

Earlier, India’s Sherpa to G20 Amitabh Kant said, “India has done some phenomenal work on startups. When we started the Startup India movement, there were just about 200 odd startups. Today we have 80,000 plus startups and 106 unicorns so we are going to use this to see how the startup movement can be accelerated among G20 and the world.”

According to Kant, India is looking forward to focusing on the digital transformation that the startups have brought to the country. India saw 7x more digital payments than the US and the EU, while it was 3x more than China, Kant added. 

The inception of the Startup20 events was held in Hyderabad on January 28 and 29, while the final summit is going to be held in Gurugram, this July. 

A Startup India report states that India ranks third in the list of startup ecosystems in the world and is expected to witness  Y-o-Y consistent annual growth of 12-15%.

According to an Inc42 report, India has so far seen the launch of more than 60,000 startups. The country has seen 108 startups touching the unicorn status. Having raised over $136 Bn since 2014, the startups’ combined value currently stands at around $500 Bn.

In another report, the Inc42 team found, in the Q1 of 2023, startup funding declined to 75% year-on-year.

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