India has a unicorn in a space that’s uniquely tied to the country’s own culture.
Noida-based Astrotalk, the country’s largest online astrology and spiritual-tech platform, has entered the unicorn club after conducting an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) buyback at a valuation of $1 billion. The company confirmed that more than 100 employees sold shares as part of the buyback, making Astrotalk India’s 133rd unicorn, and notably, the first from the astrology and spiritual-tech space to hit the milestone.
From a failed IT startup to a $1 billion astrology platform
Astrotalk’s founding story is almost stranger than the predictions it sells. Founder Puneet Gupta, a graduate of Punjab Engineering College, started his career as an analyst at Nomura and BNP Paribas before turning entrepreneur with an IT services startup called CodeYeti in 2015. Two years before CodeYeti eventually shut down in 2017, an astrologer had told Gupta his venture would fail within two years, a prediction he’d dismissed at the time. When it actually happened, the moment reportedly shook his rational side, as he later described it in interviews, pushing him to take astrology more seriously.
That personal experience became the seed for Astrotalk, which Gupta founded in 2017 along with co-founder Anmol Jain, who had previously worked as Director of Product Management at INDmoney. The idea was simple: bring the largely offline, unorganised world of Indian astrology onto a digital platform where users could consult verified astrologers over chat, call, and video, covering everything from Vedic astrology and Kundli matching to tarot, numerology, and Vastu.
Scaling to a category leader
What started as a small platform has since grown into a business claiming roughly 80% share of India’s online astrology market, with over 60 million users and thousands of verified astrologers, tarot readers, numerologists, and Vastu experts on board. The company has also pushed into international markets, with a meaningful share of revenue now coming from outside India, largely driven by the diaspora.
Astrotalk has kept its funding relatively lean compared to typical consumer internet unicorns. It raised its first institutional round in August 2021, followed by a Series A in February 2024, and a Series A-II extension in June 2024. In total, the company has raised close to $34 million from investors including Left Lane Capital, Elev8 Venture Partners, and QED Investors, taking its valuation from around $300 million in mid-2024 to $1 billion today, more than triple in roughly two years.
Unlike many Indian startups that have needed repeated large capital infusions to reach unicorn status, Astrotalk’s rise has been backed by strong underlying financials. The company reported revenue of ₹651 crore and a profit of ₹100 crore in FY24, and by FY25, revenue had nearly doubled to around ₹1,200 crore, with net profit growing roughly 2.5X to about ₹250 crore. The company now says its annual revenue run rate has crossed ₹2,500 crore, driven both by its core astrology-consultation business and its newer ecommerce arm.
That ecommerce push, Astrotalk Store, was launched in November 2024, selling gemstones, rudraksha, bracelets, necklaces, and other spiritual products. The vertical began scaling commercially from January 2025 and generated more than ₹140 crore in operating revenue in its first 12 months, and has since reached an annual run rate of about ₹300 crore. The company has said it plans to take the Store offline as well, with its first experiential retail outlet expected to open in the Delhi NCR region in the coming months.
The ESOP buyback and what it signals
Announcing the ESOP buyback, Astrotalk co-founder and CEO Puneet Gupta said the company had focused over the years on building a profitable and sustainable business, and that being able to fund the ESOP buyback entirely from its own profits made the milestone “especially rewarding,” adding that it showed strong businesses could create wealth not just for founders and investors but for the employees who build them. Astrotalk has consistently framed employee ownership as core to its culture since its early days, and the buyback gives eligible staff a chance to cash out partially while continuing to hold equity in the company’s future growth.
The company is headquartered in Noida with a presence across the Delhi NCR region.
What’s next
Astrotalk’s unicorn tag comes at a time when the company has been preparing for a public listing, having reportedly hired a new CFO with IPO and compliance experience and strengthened its governance and audit processes. An IPO had earlier been targeted for sometime around 2026-27, and the $1 billion valuation milestone, achieved organically through an ESOP buyback rather than a fresh primary funding round, is likely to be seen as another step in that direction.
For now, Astrotalk’s unicorn status is a rare instance of a distinctly Indian, culturally-rooted consumer business reaching the milestone without following the capital-heavy playbook that has defined much of the country’s startup boom, instead leaning on profitability, a loyal user base, and a long-standing belief that the demand for astrology in India was always there, it just needed a better way to reach people.