From edtech to quantum: India’s student founders redraw startup map

Bengaluru: India’s student startup ecosystem is undergoing a sharp shift toward deep-tech and research-led ventures, with founders increasingly building in sectors such as AI, defence, climate and quantum technologies instead of the consumer internet and edtech models that dominated the previous decade, according to a report by Campus Fund.

The fund’s fifth annual “State of Student Entrepreneurship in India” report, which analysed more than 7,300 startups evaluated in 2025, found that deep-tech had emerged as the single largest category among student-led ventures, accounting for 16.87% of the funnel. That marks a dramatic shift from 2021, when deep-tech was outside the top five startup sectors tracked by the fund.

At the same time, edtech’s share of the startup funnel has fallen 36% relative to 2021 levels, while services startups saw a 52% decline, as generative AI tools automate large parts of tutoring, content creation and freelance work.

“Five years ago, a typical investment committee conversation was about whether a team could ship. Today, it is about whether they can defend,” the report said, pointing to a broader rise in technical sophistication among younger founders.

The Bengaluru-based fund said it evaluated over 7,300 startups this year, up 52% from 2024 and more than nine times the roughly 800 startups it assessed in 2020. Overall, Campus Fund has now evaluated nearly 19,700 student-led startups across five years.

The report suggests India’s startup geography is also widening beyond traditional metro clusters. In the first edition of the report, nearly 60% of startups came from Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Hyderabad. That figure has now fallen below 40%, with cities such as Pilani, Vellore, Jaipur and Bhubaneswar emerging as consistent startup hubs.

Delhi overtook Bengaluru for the first time in city-level student startup volume, contributing 13.27% of startups in the funnel compared with Bengaluru’s 12.99%. At the state level, Karnataka remained on top with 15.29%, followed closely by Delhi, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, all within a narrow 2.5 percentage-point band.

The report also highlighted a surge in research-led entrepreneurship. The number of PhD founders in the startup funnel rose nearly seven-fold, from 35 in 2020-21 to 237 in 2024-25.

Within deep-tech, however, most activity remains concentrated around applied AI. Nearly 79% of deep-tech startups tracked by the fund were categorised under “cross-domain and enabling AI technologies”, including large language model applications, computer vision and AI middleware. Frontier sectors such as quantum technologies, neuromorphic computing and photonics together accounted for less than 2% of the deep-tech funnel.

Richa Bajpai, founder and chief executive of Campus Fund, said the debate around student entrepreneurship had fundamentally changed. “The question is no longer whether students can build venture-scale companies,” she said in the report. “It is whether capital, policy and academic infrastructure can keep pace with what they are already building.”