Tech3 | How many Indian unicorns were profitable in FY22; Twitter's special algo for Musk; and more

In today's Tech3 newsletter, unicorn report card; Twitter changes algo to boost Musk’s tweets

One important thing:?Amazon, Google, and Zomato?are among 32 companies?that have been granted in-principle authorisation by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to act as online payment aggregators.?

• Applications from an additional 18 companies, including PhonePe, CRED, and Mobikwik (Zaakpay), are currently under process, RBI said.?

In today’s newsletter:

• Only 6 of India's 51 unicorns profitable in FY22
• Boosting Elon Musk's Twitter popularity, CEO can wait
• Space industry's pitch for dedicated spaces

Only 6 of India's 51 unicorns profitable in FY22

Result day is never enjoyable for anyone. Even more so when you know how the exams went.?It's been the same feeling for Indian unicorns in recent months, as 51 of them have reported their FY22 financials.

Among them,?only six showed a positive bottom line. This number is even lower than it was a year ago, as four of the companies in this dataset - Fractal, Lenskart, Games 24x7, and Shiprocket - have fallen into the red this year.

Stars of the show

Turn your attention to SaaS companies, which appear to have figured out the key to investors' hearts, thanks to their high gross margins.

Uniphore, for instance, turned a profit of Rs 33.5 crore from a loss of nearly Rs 282 crore in FY21. Others in the fray include:

• Infra.Market and OfBusiness - Only these two startups clocked a profit of more than Rs 100 crore
• Mamaearth, meanwhile, saw its profit halving to Rs 14 crore from nearly Rs 30 crore earlier
• Sadly, no fintech unicorns made the list

Where are the profits?

As with a million other things that have gone wrong since 2020, the lack of profits in the startup ecosystem can be partially attributed to the dreadful Covid-19 pandemic.

• To capitalise on an increase in demand caused by stay-at-home restrictions, most founders focused on 'growth at all costs,' and got a little carried away

Startups thus spent millions of dollars on growth, which eventually led to about 45, in this dataset alone, incurring significant losses.

Go deeper. Also, read what investors and experts think about startups’ inflated valuations in the?first part of this data series.?

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