Groww, Lenskart and PhysicsWallah all listed in November, weeks after LG and Tata Capital. A decade ago their founders would have aimed for the Nasdaq. Three things changed.
For most of the 2010s, the exit plan of an ambitious Indian startup ran through New York. Raise dollars, grow fast and one day ring the bell on the Nasdaq, where investors were believed to understand technology companies. That script has reversed. In November alone, Groww, Lenskart and PhysicsWallah all listed in India, weeks after LG Electronics India and Tata Capital made October one of the busiest IPO months in the market’s history. Several of these companies had moved their legal headquarters back from the United States or Singapore to make it possible.
The buyers showed up at home
An IPO needs someone on the other side of the trade, and India spent the last five years producing them. The country now has around 20 crore demat accounts, most of them opened since 2020 by young, phone-first investors. Many of those investors are daily users of the very apps now coming to market. Groww is a brokerage, so its listing was in a real sense a company selling shares to its own customers, and its value passed ₹1 lakh crore within days of listing. On the Nasdaq, it would have been explaining to a fund manager in Boston why that matters.
The rulebook caught up
Indian exchanges once effectively required a record of profits before a company could list, which excluded almost every startup, since startups lose money by design while they grow. The current rules allow loss-making companies to list provided qualified institutional buyers take at least three quarters of the issue. That single change opened the door in 2021, when Zomato, Nykaa and Paytm walked through it. The bumpy share prices that followed taught a useful lesson about valuation, but they did not close the door.
An IPO is not only a company raising money. It is the earliest investors finally being paid back.
Coming home
Many Indian startups were legally registered abroad because foreign venture funds preferred it. Moving that registration back, known as reverse flipping, costs money and sometimes a large tax bill. Groww, Meesho, Razorpay and PhonePe all decided it was worth paying, because Indian investors now value consumer businesses they know firsthand at prices that rival, and sometimes beat, what American markets offer. Venture funds that backed these companies a decade ago need their money back on roughly ten-year clocks, and a domestic listing has become the most reliable way to get it.
- Indian startups once aimed for US listings. The 2021 wave, and now the 2025 wave, proved home listings work at scale.
- India has around 20 crore demat accounts, many held by daily users of the apps coming to market.
- SEBI’s rules let loss-making companies list if institutional investors take most of the issue.
- Several startups “reverse-flipped” their headquarters back to India before listing.
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