Prototype stage startups in India
1,64,845 of the 4,38,195 records that carry a stage describe themselves as Prototype. 72,167 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 Prototype stage
1,64,845
of 4,50,557 (37%)
DPIIT recognised
72,167
of 1,64,845 (44%)
With a full record
68,435
of 1,64,845 (42%)
Enough of the company's own writing to earn a page in search.
Districts represented
1,433
The 24 with the most are listed below.
What the label means
A company saying it has built something to test rather than something it sells. On the register this is the largest group by a wide margin, which is what you would expect of a register anyone may join at the moment they have an idea and a company registration.
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 Prototype 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 15,484
- Mumbai 11,083
- Bengaluru 10,556
- Hyderabad 7,131
- Pune 6,508
- Chennai 4,892
- Ahmedabad 4,608
- Noida 4,099
- Kolkata 3,993
- Gurugram 3,381
- Lucknow 3,322
- Jaipur 2,957
- Ghaziabad 2,270
- Surat 1,809
- Indore 1,801
- Bhopal 1,672
- Nagpur 1,618
- Patna 1,577
- Kochi 1,527
- Bhubaneswar 1,398
- Vadodara 1,350
- Coimbatore 1,316
- Faridabad 1,193
- Kanpur 1,115
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 1,64,845 companies at Prototype stage. Industries are self-selected and are not audited either.
- IT Services 17,738
- Healthcare & Lifesciences 12,420
- Food & Beverages 10,344
- Education 8,948
- Construction 8,756
- Agriculture 8,517
- Others 8,047
- Professional & Commercial Services 7,338
- Retail 4,636
- Technology Hardware 4,337
- Renewable Energy 4,190
- Finance Technology 4,111
- AI 4,080
- Human Resources 4,019
- Marketing 3,779
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 Prototype at 1,71,058 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.