Methodology

Snapshot 2026-08, generated 2026-09-23. Every figure on this page is rendered from the dataset it describes, so it cannot drift away from what we actually hold.

In one paragraph

We publish an entity map of the Indian startup ecosystem assembled from Indian government open data: the Startup India (DPIIT) register, iStart Rajasthan, Kerala Startup Mission and the Startup India Seed Fund Scheme. Startups are normalised into one schema, deduplicated by CIN then website hostname then normalised name plus city, geocoded, and republished with attribution. 4,53,192 companies.

What this is not

Indian Startup Map is an independent publication by Apexlayer Technologies. We are not DPIIT, not Startup India, and not affiliated with the Government of India. A page on this site is a listing, not an endorsement.

A page on this site is not a certificate, an endorsement or a verification, and nothing here should be used for due diligence.

"Registered" is not "operating"

This is the most important paragraph on the site. A registration on Startup India is a form somebody filled in. A large share of these entities are dormant, never traded, or have been wound up. We have no liveness signal at all: no filings feed, no revenue, no check that the website still resolves. If a page here says a company exists, it means a startup exists.

2,31,835 of 4,53,192 startups are DPIIT recognised. Recognition confers eligibility for tax benefits, self-certification and IPR support. It is not a vetting of the business, not proof of trading, and not a financial assessment. We display the status and the DIPP number as the portal publishes them. We never assert it ourselves.

Two different dates

A startup can carry two years and they mean different things. Registered on Startup India is when someone created the profile. Incorporated comes from Ministry of Corporate Affairs startups via a CIN lookup and is the real founding date. We label them separately everywhere, and we never emit the portal date as a founding date in structured data.

How precise the locations are

61% of our coordinates are district centroids. That is a label on a map, not an address.

Only the 1,64,879 startups with a high-confidence street-level coordinate are ever drawn as a pin, or given coordinates in structured data. Everything else is drawn as an area, which is what the circles on the map are. This is enforced in the export, in the map's own filter and by a build gate, because a rule that lives only in prose does not survive contact with a redesign.

Address privacy

Registered offices in company-registry records are frequently founders' home addresses. We print the registered office as filed with the MCA, trimmed of contact details; it never appears in a report or an export, and a request from the company removes it within two working days. A build gate greps the entire site output for internal address fields, PAN-shaped strings and bare mobile numbers, and fails the build on any hit.

We also do not publish director names taken from company-registry mirrors. Those lists routinely include spouses and parents added to satisfy the two-director requirement, who never worked at the company.

Funding, and how little we know

We keep three separate classes of evidence and never merge them into one "funded" flag, because they are not equally strong:

• Self-declared: a checkbox on a government form, unverified.
• State-reported: a figure given to a state startup scheme.
• Portfolio listing: named on an incubator's or investor's own public portfolio.

47,696 of 4,53,192 startups carry at least one of those signals. Not one of them carries a rupee amount on this site, and that is deliberate: the government form records that money was raised far more often than how much, and a self-declared figure with no round, no date and no source is not a funding fact. So there are no round sizes, no valuations and no cap tables here either.

The only hard money on this site is the Startup India Seed Fund Scheme: Rs 755.3 crore approved and Rs 526.4 crore disbursed across 175 incubators in 26 states, published incubator by incubator in the Seed Fund ledger. Those totals cover the incubators the scheme publishes an approved amount for. A further 18 appear in its own file with Rs 12.7 crore disbursed against no approved figure at all, which is a hole in the source rather than something we can quietly fill in, so they sit outside every total above.

Checking our own homework

The government computes facet counts over the entire register on every search response. That gives us an independent number to reconcile against rather than a restatement of our own. Nationally the register holds 4,59,033 startups by stage: Prototype 1,71,058, Validation 1,33,607, Early traction 1,04,330, Scaling 50,038. The state-by-state reconciliation, including every place we differ, is printed in full on the data page and again on each of the 36 state pages. Publishing the arithmetic that could embarrass us is the point.

What we do not know

• Whether a company is trading.
• Revenue, headcount or any financial position.
• Funding rounds, investors on the cap table, or valuations.
• Whether the website on file still resolves.
• Whether the entity still exists.

And the uncomfortable one: 50% of these startups carry no distinguishing content beyond a name, a district, an industry and a stage. We publish those as registry records, mark them so search engines do not index them, and tell you here that we have done so. The same goes for most of the rest: a company page is offered to search engines only when it carries something the register alone does not, a named third party behind the company (an incubator portfolio, a state scheme, an accelerator or a venture fund). A description copied from the register is on many other sites already, so on its own it does not qualify. Every company page stays readable here either way.

Corrections

Everything here derives from public government records. The authoritative place to correct a fact is the source portal, and we pick corrections up on the next monthly snapshot. To flag an error on our side, write to trust@indianstartupmap.com. Where a source is wrong, we annotate rather than silently overwrite: the page will say what the portal says and what we believe. If you want to reuse any of this, the terms are on the licence page.