Early Traction stage startups in India
98,671 of the 4,38,195 records that carry a stage describe themselves as Early Traction. 54,872 of those are also DPIIT recognised.
Stage is self-declared by the company on its Startup India profile. It is not assessed by DPIIT and it is not audited.
At Early Traction stage
98,671
of 4,50,557 (22%)
DPIIT recognised
54,872
of 98,671 (56%)
With a full record
58,343
of 98,671 (59%)
Enough of the company's own writing to earn a page in search.
Districts represented
1,179
The 24 with the most are listed below.
What the label means
A company saying it has customers and some repeatable revenue, but is not yet growing quickly. It is the point on the ladder at which the question stops being whether the product works and starts being whether the business does.
That is the ordinary reading of the word, not a definition we are quoting. Startup India offers a fixed list of stages and asks the founder to choose one. It publishes no test for any of them, and nothing on the register records who checked, because nobody did.
Where they are
The 24 districts with the most companies at Early Traction stage. Startup India records a district rather than a city. Districts without a page of their own are listed but not linked, because a district page exists only above 25 companies.
- Delhi 10,079
- Bengaluru 9,420
- Mumbai 8,401
- Hyderabad 5,136
- Pune 4,882
- Chennai 3,829
- Ahmedabad 2,954
- Gurugram 2,943
- Noida 2,851
- Kolkata 2,609
- Jaipur 1,895
- Lucknow 1,534
- Kochi 1,321
- Ghaziabad 1,297
- Indore 1,116
- Surat 1,059
- Coimbatore 1,024
- Bhubaneswar 897
- Bhopal 807
- Nagpur 793
- Faridabad 781
- Patna 775
- Vadodara 748
- Thiruvananthapuram 627
What they build
The 15 most common of the 56 industries recorded at this stage. A company may pick more than one when it registers, so these counts add up to more than the 98,671 companies at Early Traction stage. Industries are self-selected and are not audited either.
- IT Services 11,765
- Healthcare & Lifesciences 7,617
- Education 7,280
- Food & Beverages 6,309
- Professional & Commercial Services 4,702
- Agriculture 4,323
- Construction 4,009
- Others 3,593
- Retail 2,950
- AI 2,838
- Finance Technology 2,803
- Technology Hardware 2,628
- Marketing 2,495
- Renewable Energy 2,297
- Enterprise Software 2,145
The other stages
About this data
Counts come from our own sweep of the Startup India register, snapshot 2026-08, over the 4,50,557 records we publish. Startup India's own census puts Early Traction at 1,04,330 across the 4,67,663 profiles it counts, a wider population than ours.
Registration is not an operating signal. A large share of registered startups are dormant, and we have no way to tell you which. How we counted.