The Japanese have proven to be some of the biggest investors in the Indian start-up ecosystem, since the year 2014 onwards. Out of the 29 unicorn companies of India, about 12 of them have Japanese investors in them, which add up to a total investment worth 59 billion USD. However, such investments are not limited to the giant Unicorn companies of India; the Japanese have invested further into smaller start-ups which are having positive growth.

According to a research published by DataLabs, the research wing of INC42 Media – Between the years

2014 and 2019, a total number of 105 Indian start-ups have received capital from Japanese investors. These investments are said to be spread across a total of 157 deals. According to another report named “Japanese Investors in India Report 2019’’ – the participation of Japanese investors have doubled from 15 in 2015 to 34 by 2019, with a spike of over 28 percent.Out of all the deals done between the years 2014 to 2019, majority of the investment are poured in three sectors of E-commerce (21 deals), Enterprise Tech. (20 deals), and Transport Tech. (14 deals), which accounts to around 40 percent of the total investment.

Some of the prominent investors include Beenos, Hiro Mashita, Incubate Fund, STRIVE, SoftBank among others. Analysis from DataLab shows that 95% of the total investments have been in start-ups which are located in Tier 1 cities. Surprisingly, many start-ups that the Japanese invested upon have evolved into Unicorns, post funding. SoftBank has proven to be the most active investor and has so far backed 10 Unicorns, it includes- Paytm, Paytm Mall, Ola, OYO, Hike, Delhivery, InMobi, and Snapdeal among others.
The strategy behind such successful investment has been the nature of the investors, to invest in safe bets and already established start-ups. Japanese investor in the Indian start-up space only highlights the emerging dominance of Indian consumer market.