MUMBAI: Building for startups as employees can come with their own competitive advantage—young ventures being set up by such tech professionals are finding favour with venture capital (VC) investors who are infusing funds into their companies even though the broader flow of investments continues to be selective.VCs are betting on experience here. The number of such ventures which the industry defines as operator-led startups are very small at this point–some 189 or less than 1% of all tech startups founded between 2023 and 2025 but their share of funding within the ecosystem is growing—it nearly doubled to 11% of total ecosystem funding in 2025 from 5.8% in 2023, faster than that of rest of the players, a joint report released by Tracxn and VC firm RTP Global showed.
On an average, operator-led startups also bagged bigger sized cheques and higher valuations for their early seed and series A rounds. “As India’s most disruptive startups like Flipkart, Swiggy, Meesho, Zomato grew, they became training grounds for a generation. Operators have become a founder class. Fewer than one in a hundred companies in this market are operator-led, yet they now land one in ten of its $1 million plus rounds,” said analysts in the report.Operator-founders bring a distinct company-building muscle shaped by experience, scaling teams, navigating constraints and executing through multiple phases of growth, said Nishit Garg, partner, Asia investment team at RTP Global. As AI fundamentally changes how products are built, the qualities that operators bring of execution focus and capital discipline become even more valuable, said Garg.In all, about 50 new operator-led startups got launched in 2025, higher than 37 such firms that started operations a couple of years ago. The broader space contracted with about 2,633 tech startups setting up shops in 2025 from 7,805 companies in 2024.
