Methodology
Snapshot 2026-08, generated 2026-08-19. 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. Records are normalised into one schema, deduplicated by CIN then website hostname then normalised name plus city, geocoded, and republished with attribution. 4,56,713 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 record, 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 record exists.
2,30,895 of 4,56,713 records 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 company record 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 records 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
87% of our coordinates are district centroids. That is a label on a map, not an address.
Location precision
Bar widths are the real proportions. Only the 4,912 records with a street-level coordinate are ever drawn as a pin. Everything else is drawn as an area, because that is what we actually know.
- street
- 4,912
- 1%
- We know a street-level coordinate.
- locality
- 56,569
- 12%
- We know the area, not the address.
- district
- 3,95,232
- 87%
- We know the district only.
- unplaced
- 0
- 0%
- We know nowhere we could verify.
Only the 4,912 records 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. 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 store the full address line internally so we can geocode it, and we never publish it. Public surfaces show a locality and a coordinate, never a door number. A build gate greps the entire site output for 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.
We hold a rupee amount for 226 records out of 4,56,713. There are no round sizes, no dates, no valuations and no cap tables on this site, because we do not have them. The only hard money here is the Startup India Seed Fund Scheme: Rs 755.2 crore approved and Rs 539.1 crore disbursed across 193 incubators in 26 states.
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, earlytraction 1,04,330, scaling 50,038. Per-state comparisons, including where we differ, are printed on each state page. 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: 63% of these records 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.
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.