Today, we dive into how Y Combinator â the worldâs most prestigious start-up accelerator â seemingly doesnât want Indiaâs founders anymore.
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Macro
Modi provides a $5 billion (âš445 billion) relief package for exporters through loan programs. There are $2.3 billion (âš204.7 billion) worth of collateral free loans and the rest is in a six-year loan program.Â
ââCitigroup sees the rupee rebounding to 87 based on a US FTA.While news of a trade deal is widespread, the actual reaction should propel the rupee upwards. Citi is expressing the trade with 3 month options bullish on the rupee.
Equities
Jubilant (Domino's Indian operator) posts a 54 percent profit growth y-o-y, from surging sales. Same-store-sales grew 9.1 percent leading to revenue from operations rising 20 percent to $272.1 million (âš23.4 billion). Jubilant believes sales will continue to grow from GST cuts.Â
Tata Motors sees HSD demand growth from tax cuts and infrastructure boosts.First half sales grew by 3 percent in H1 y-o-y but it expects far larger growth as the year continues. There was a quarterly loss of $11.6 million (âš1 billion) due to a one-time impairment charge.
Alts
Mahindra Mahindra enters into a JV with Canadian brand Manulife. For Manulife, the investment helps them enter one of the fastest growing insurance markets projected to be worth $25.2 billion (âš25 trillion). This extends an existing 5 year partnership with both companies spending over $400 million (âš35.6 billion).Â
ReNew is investing $9.3 billion (âš820 billion) in Andhra Pradesh for green projects.They are setting up a 6 GW ingot-wafer plant, a 2 GW pumped hydro project, and another 5 GW of hybrid projects.
Policy
SEBI wants to ease lock-up requirements for existing stakeholders in IPO. Current lock-up requirements are considered cumbersome since the standard is 6 months. The disclosure time would remain the same, but existing shareholders could exit faster.
Where to Invest $100,000 According to Experts
Investors face a dilemma. Headlines everywhere say tariffs and AI hype are distorting public markets.
Now, the S&P is trading at over 30x earningsâa level historically linked to crashes.
And the Fed is lowering rates, potentially adding fuel to the fire.
Bloomberg asked where experts would personally invest $100,000 for their September edition. One surprising answer? Art.
Itâs what billionaires like Bezos, Gates, and the Rockefellers have used to diversify for decades.
Why?
Contemporary art prices have appreciated 11.2% annually on average
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Ultra-high net worth collectors (>$50M) allocated 25% of their portfolios to art on average. (UBS, 2024)
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Y Combinator Doesnât Want Indiaâs founders Anymore
Y Combinator doesnât want Indiaâs founders anymore, or at least thatâs what the numbers suggest. YC is one of the most prestigious startup incubators and, in 2021, 66 Indian startups made it into YCâs batches. By 2023, the number was down to 12. In 2025: 1. The accelerator that once served as the launchpad for Indiaâs most promising early-stage founders (from Meesho to Clear) now looks like itâs quietly retreating from the worldâs third-largest startup ecosystem.
Founders in Bengaluru and Delhi used to scramble to incorporate Delaware entities, fly to Mountain View, and chase the network effect of Silicon Valley capital. Now that pipeline is drying up. YCâs India exposure has shrunk, and so has its willingness to deal with the legal and logistical headache of foreign teams. The deeper structural shift is the lack of YC need for Indian founders.Â
Indiaâs funding ecosystem has matured faster than almost any in the world. Even as global venture activity slowed, Indian startups raised roughly $8.2 billion (âš729.8 billion) in 2024, keeping the country firmly in the top three for global startup funding, behind only the U.S. and China. Homegrown funds like Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India), Nexus, Accel India, and Lightspeed, have the firepower to anchor Series A and B rounds locally. Meanwhile, âreverse-flippingâ, startups moving their parent entities back from Delaware or Singapore to India, has become a dominant trend.Â
The visa issue, though, has sharpened the divide. Many founders who did make it into YC have been blocked by U.S. immigration policy. The team behind Giga (a startup that reportedly outperformed Anthropicâs Claude on LLM benchmarks) was denied U.S. visas twice. Rising visa fees, more frequent denials, and increased bureaucratic scrutiny have made it prohibitively difficult for international founders to live or work in the U.S. The current administrationâs stance signals even tighter restrictions on skilled-worker visas like H-1B. That means fewer founders setting up U.S. entities, fewer cross-border teams, and more innovation staying in India.
The accelerator now favors startups that can quickly scale in AI, dev tools, and hard tech, areas that require deep ties to U.S. infrastructure and capital. Indian teams, by contrast, tend to excel in fintech, logistics, and SaaS. These are domains where distribution and regulation matter more than access to GPU clusters. Combine that with YCâs requirement for U.S. incorporation, and the math stops making sense for many Indian founders. The upside of staying local now outweighs the brand equity of a three-month stint in San Francisco. Founders can now scale to IPO or unicorn status without ever leaving the subcontinent.
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Written by Yash Tibrewal. Edited by Shreyas Sinha.
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