While it’s not easy to become a unicorn, what can be even harder is staying there.
A fresh Moneycontrol analysis, citing Venture Intelligence data, has found that at least 12 Indian startups that once carried the coveted $1 billion tag no longer do. The list spans e-commerce relics from a decade ago to edtech giants that boomed during the pandemic and have since come crashing back down. Unacademy is the newest name to join the club, following its acquisition by upGrad earlier this year at a fraction of its old valuation. Here’s a look at all 12, and how each one got here.
Paytm Mall
Paytm Mall was launched in 2016 as Paytm’s answer to Flipkart and Amazon, betting on a hyperlocal offline-to-online model that plugged neighbourhood stores into an online storefront. It raised close to $500 million from Alibaba and SoftBank in 2018 and briefly touched a valuation of around $3 billion. But the company never found a way to compete with the cash reserves of Flipkart and Amazon, and its parent Paytm’s own troubles after its stock market listing didn’t help matters either. Alibaba and Ant Group eventually pulled back their support and exited the cap table, and Paytm Mall’s valuation is now estimated to be a small fraction of what it once commanded.
Hike
Hike Messenger was once seen as India’s homegrown answer to WhatsApp, building a loyal base of over 100 million users and turning founder Kavin Bharti Mittal into a poster child of India’s consumer internet boom. It reached unicorn status in 2016 on the back of investment from Tencent and Foxconn. The problem was that WhatsApp only got stronger, and Hike’s messaging business never found a way to hold onto users once data got cheap and Meta’s app became the default across the country. Hike eventually pivoted away from messaging altogether, shutting down its core chat product in 2021 to focus on gaming and other bets, and its valuation slid well below the billion-dollar mark in the process.
ShopClues
ShopClues built its early reputation on being the marketplace for India’s smaller towns, an antidote to the metro-heavy focus of Flipkart and Amazon. It crossed the unicorn mark in 2016 after a $100 million round led by Tiger Global. The trouble was that as bigger platforms began chasing the same tier-2 and tier-3 buyers, ShopClues found itself outgunned on funding and unable to keep pace, and a very public founder feud between Sandeep and Radhika Aggarwal didn’t help investor confidence either. The company was eventually sold to Singapore’s Qoo10 in 2019 in an all-stock deal reportedly worth just $70-100 million, a steep fall from its billion-dollar peak and one of the more dramatic valuation resets in Indian startup history.
Quikr
Quikr grew from a simple classifieds site into one of India’s most acquisitive startups, buying up companies like CommonFloor, Grabhouse and Zefo as it tried to become a one-stop shop for everything from real estate to used cars. It hit unicorn status in 2015 after a round led by Steadview Capital. But running a dozen different businesses under one roof proved harder than it looked, and Quikr began cutting jobs and shutting down verticals as growth slowed. Investor Kinnevik later marked down its holding in the company by 45%, pegging Quikr’s value at around $570 million, well short of unicorn territory.
Snapdeal
Snapdeal’s story is probably the most well-known cautionary tale in Indian startup lore. At its peak in 2016, the company was valued at around $6.5 billion and was locked in a fierce three-way battle with Flipkart and Amazon for control of Indian e-commerce. A failed merger with Flipkart, backed by SoftBank, marked the beginning of the end, and Snapdeal spent the years after shutting down sub-brands like Exclusively and Shopo as it retreated to a leaner, value-focused business. Snapdeal has since found a smaller but more sustainable footing in India’s budget e-commerce segment, though its valuation today sits well under $1 billion.
Rivigo
Rivigo set out to fix one of Indian logistics’ oldest problems: exhausted truck drivers on long-haul routes. Its relay model, where drivers swapped at pit stops instead of driving thousands of kilometres non-stop, earned it unicorn status in 2019 at a valuation of $1.05 billion. The pandemic then hit full-stack logistics players particularly hard, since Rivigo owned much of its own fleet and carried fixed costs that didn’t disappear even as freight volumes dried up. An attempted pivot to an asset-light marketplace model failed to gain traction, and the company ended up selling off roughly 80% of its trucks. Rivigo eventually sold its core B2B express business to Mahindra Logistics in 2022 for about ₹225 crore, a small sum next to the money it had raised at its peak.
MyGlamm
MyGlamm, later rebranded as The Good Glamm Group, tried something different: pairing a D2C beauty brand with a stable of acquired content platforms like POPxo, ScoopWhoop and MissMalini to drive customer acquisition cheaply. It worked well enough to earn unicorn status in 2021 at a $1.2 billion valuation, and founder Darpan Sanghvi talked openly about a $10 billion IPO. The acquisition spree that followed, however, never quite came together, engagement on its content platforms declined as independent creators took over that space, and several of the founders behind acquired brands walked away. The Good Glamm Group went on to lay off employees repeatedly, delayed salaries, and by 2025 was reportedly seeking funding at a valuation of around $120 million, a 90% cut from its unicorn days.
Byju’s
No startup captures the scale of India’s unicorn reset quite like Byju’s. The edtech company rode the pandemic to a peak valuation of $22 billion in 2022, making it briefly the most valuable startup in the country and turning founder Byju Raveendran into one of India’s youngest billionaires. What followed was a slow-motion collapse: delayed financial filings, a bruising legal battle with lenders in the US, an acquisition spree that left it overextended, and mounting scrutiny over its sales practices. Shareholders eventually voted to remove Raveendran as CEO, and a US court issued a $1.07 billion judgment against the company in late 2025. Byju himself has since said the company’s worth has fallen to a fraction of what it once was, and a resolution professional has taken charge of what remains.
PharmEasy
PharmEasy, run by parent company API Holdings, built India’s largest online pharmacy and diagnostics business, and its $600 million acquisition of listed diagnostics chain Thyrocare in 2021 pushed its valuation to a peak of $5.6 billion. That acquisition was funded largely through debt from Goldman Sachs, and once the funding winter set in, PharmEasy found itself unable to raise fresh capital without agreeing to steep markdowns. Investors Neuberger Berman and Janus Henderson both cut the value of their holdings, and the company eventually raised money through a rights issue priced at roughly a 90% discount to its previous valuation. Under new leadership, PharmEasy has since focused on trimming its cash burn rather than chasing growth, but its valuation remains well below the billion-dollar mark.
Unacademy
Unacademy is the latest entrant to this list. What started as a YouTube channel by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini and Hemesh Singh grew into one of India’s largest test-prep platforms, hitting a peak valuation of $3.4 billion in 2021 on the back of a $440 million round led by Temasek. Once students went back to physical classrooms after the pandemic, Unacademy’s online growth stalled, and an expensive pivot into offline coaching centres ate into its cash without delivering the margins it needed. The company laid off hundreds of employees over successive rounds and went through multiple failed acquisition talks before finally agreeing to an all-stock deal with upGrad in May 2026, valuing the company at around $218 million, a drop of over 90% from its peak.
Droom
Droom built an AI-driven marketplace for buying and selling used vehicles, and raised $200 million in a pre-IPO round in 2021 that valued the company at $1.2 billion. Its plans to list on the Nasdaq were shelved in 2022 as market conditions turned, and the IPO has been pushed back repeatedly since. Revenue fell sharply in the years that followed, dropping 66% in FY24 alone, even as the company managed to narrow its losses. Droom raised a small pre-IPO round in 2025 at a valuation of just $360 million, and while founder Sandeep Aggarwal maintains the company still has a shot at a public listing by 2027, it no longer carries the unicorn tag it once did.
DealShare
DealShare built its business around group buying in India’s smaller towns, and reached unicorn status in January 2022 after a $165 million round led by Tiger Global, followed shortly by another raise that pushed its valuation to $1.7 billion. The following two years were rough: the company shut down its B2B business entirely, closed warehouses across several states, and went through multiple rounds of layoffs. Three of its four co-founders left the company one after another, and revenue collapsed by roughly 75% in FY24 as the business scaled back its ambitions to focus purely on B2C. DealShare is now a much smaller company than the one that raised money at unicorn valuations barely two years ago.