Bengaluru home to largest self-made entrepreneurs and most valued companies

Mumbai: Long touted as India's Silicon Valley, Bengaluru has emerged as the biggest hub for most valued companies started by self-made entrepreneurs in this millennium, a report said on Thursday.

A majority 129 such industry leaders are from the Karnataka capital, which is ahead of Mumbai (78), and Gurugram and New Delhi (49), as per a report by Hurun India.

Radhakishan Damani of Avenue Supermarkets, which runs the D-Mart retail chain, leads the list of top 200 self-made entrepreneurs of the millennium as the 2000-founded company has a market capitalisation of Rs 2.38 lakh crore as of September.

Binny Bansal and Sachin Bansal-founded Flipkart from Bengaluru comes second with an equity value of Rs 1.19 lakh crore, while Gurugram-headquartered Zomato founded by Deepinder Goyal comes third with a market capitalisation of Rs 86,835 crore.

The list includes both listed and unlisted entities, and Hurun India's founder and managing director Anas Rahman Junaid said they have taken into account the mark-downs by investors while analysing the companies' valuations. The list has 405 founders of 200 most valued companies started after the year 2000. The cumulative value of these companies is Rs 30 lakh crore.

The maximum number of companies (46) in the list come from the financial services space, which is followed by retail sector with 30 companies and healthcare at 26 companies. The list also has bootstrapped companies like the Mumbai-based Zerodha, which is ranked 10th with an equity value of Rs 50,630 crore, Rahman said, adding that it has a methodology of calculating the valuation.

Twenty women entrepreneurs feature in the list, with Nykaa founded by Falguni Nayar leading the pack. From an experience perspective, the list features 80-year-old Ashok Soota of Happiest Minds as the eldest, while Zepto's Kaivalya Vohra is the youngest in the list at 21 years.