According to Trak.in, the most invested Indian startups as of April 2021 are Byju’s Meesho, Swiggy, Groww and Beldara. Did you notice a common factor in four out of the five startups? The first four startups are all from Bengaluru. There is no doubt that Bengaluru has evolved into the Indian Silicon Valley. Many of today's startups trace their origins to this city. There are those too that leave their place of inception and move to Bengaluru. Take Infosys for example. Started in Pune the company swiftly made its way to Bengaluru. In recent times, Ola too made a similar jump to Bengaluru from Mumbai. 

Bengaluru’s Magnetic Pull

After independence in 1947, Bengaluru was like any other Indian city. But soon it transformed into the hub of public sector industries. Telecommunications, aerospace, heavy equipment, space and defence sectors moved to Bengaluru. With it went massive government funds. The Indian Telephone Industries, National Aerospace Laboratories, Hindustan Aeronautics, Bharat Earth Movers and Bharat Heavy Electronics started addressing their headquarters in Bengaluru. The arrival of these industries brought with it India’s best scientific and technical manpower within one geography. Soon the momentum turned itself and the city saw its IT Revolution of the 2000s and soon began the mushrooming of various startups. 

Wealth of Resources 

For starting any new venture, all you need are three key ingredients - an idea, the right people and capital. Bengaluru has an abundance of the latter two. It seems a new startup blooms from every hostel and university in this city. Being Asia’s fastest-growing startup ecosystem, Bengaluru has a vibrant and resourceful community. This city and the state of Karnataka has over 400 R&D centres and 85 chip designing houses. This provides startups to do business with ease. Also, the average salary of an engineer in Bengaluru is 13 times lower than that in Silicon Valley. This attracts foreign companies to get their employees from here. 

More than the people, Bengaluru provides an abundance of wealth. Besides the national schemes provided by the central government, the state too encourages innovation. Launched in 2015, the Karnataka Startup Policy has funds with a corpus of more than $47 million. Startups ranging from biotechnology to animation to even tourism can avail them. If the company registers itself under the Karnataka Shops and Commercial Establishment Act of 1961, they can get access to more funding.
The city is full of accelerator and incubator programmes that help entrepreneurs and their startups in their initial stages. Bengaluru has many such initiatives like Microsoft Accelerator, Nasscomm’s 10,000 startups, Walmart Labs and TLabs. Well established corporations like Tata Group, Mahindra & Mahindra, Yes Bank and more have their own initiatives. These reasons are the driving factor behind 45% of all funds put in Indian startups are going to Bengaluru based startups. More funds are allocated to Bengaluru startups than Delhi and Mumbai put together.