by G.Sabarinathan, PhD1
So, for all the excitement about being India’s Silicon Valley and so on, Bangalore seems to be ranked 33rd among startup cities in the world. That is what I noticed from PitchBook’s (PB) survey of October 2023.2
The scoring methodology
PB’s list identifies the top fifty cities in terms of Venture Capital (VC) financing activity. And its survey ranks cities on two different top level dimensions, namely development and growth. Development itself is measured in terms of size and maturity. Size comprises value and number of deals done, exits, investment funds and numbers of unicorns. Maturity comprises a variety of measures of how well developed the funding system is, in terms of mega exits, ratio of number of late to early stage deals, late and growth stage pre-money valuations3 and deal value. Their growth score measures the growth rate momentum of their size score over one, two, three and five year periods.
The lay of the league table
So which are the locations that rank higher than Bangalore? Not surprisingly at the top is San Francisco, followed by New York and then Beijing and Shanghai. If it appeals to your schadenfreude, you can draw some comfort from the fact that the corporate headquarters of the East India company ranked seventh. Tiny Tel Aviv just made it to the top twenty.
1G.Sabarinathan teaches at IIMB. In his lucky years, he gets enough student enrolments for him to teach his favourite elective, New Enterprise Financing. In luckier years, he even gets a teaching rating that he does not have to feel embarrassed about. In less lucky years, he spends his time writing blog posts.