Bengaluru has emerged as the top city in the country to attract funding in the start-ups category followed by Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Pune for the first nine months of 2017 calendar year.

Bengaluru has emerged as the top city in the country to attract funding in the start-ups category followed by Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Pune for the first nine months of 2017 calendar year. Start-ups in Bengaluru attracted $4.1 billion in funding which was more than half the total amount of $7.8 billion raised by Indian start-ups in the first three quarter of calendar year 2017, according to data from research firm Tracxn. Bengaluru was always considered as the IT hub of India and hence as an extension a start-up hub. However, due to the rise of some of the Delhi-NCR based companies like Paytm, Snapdeal, MakeMyTrip, Zomato, Ibibo, MobiKwik and others, the region emerged as a rival to India’s silicon valley. In fact, for the corresponding nine-month period of 2016, the Delhi NCR region had achieved the number one spot cornering around $1.2 billion out of the total 3.3 billion of total start-up funding that took place across India. In 2016, Bengaluru stood second after Delhi-NCR. However, the tided has changed this year and Bengaluru has bounced back riding largely on the heavy infusion of funding into companies such as Flipkart and Ola.

The period under reckoning also saw a series of billion-dollar investment rounds in the Indian start-up ecosystem, with Flipkart, Ola and Paytm having raised massive amounts of capital this year. Flipkart topped the table after having raised $2.5 billion from Japanese internet major, Softbank and another $1.4 billion from eBay Inc, Tencent and Microsoft. Ola announced raising $1.1 billion from Tencent and Softbank this month and it had earlier raised $250 million from the Japanese internet major. Paytm too raised $1.4 billion from SoftBank earlier this year.

Apart from the funding rounds at Flipkart and Ola, raising of funds by Bengaluru based Swiggy, BigBasket and Byju’s also helped the southern city to pip the Delhi-NCR region. The other emerging start-up cities beyond the two cities of Bengaluru and Delhi NCR are – Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, and Chennai, according to Tracxn data.In case of Hyderabad, the funding for start-ups increased from $26.3 million in the first nine months of 2016 to $201.5 million in 2017. However, in the case of Mumbai, there was actually a drop in funding for start-ups. The city witnessed a funding of $731.8 million for the first nine months of 2016 but in 2017 for the same period it stood at $489.8 million. In the case of Pune, it was almost steady.