Your startup has just hit over a billion dollars in valuation and there are a couple of million dollars in the bank – how much do you pay yourself? Let’s see what the data says.
The median annual salary for Indian unicorn founders in FY23 was Rs 1.5 crores. Of course, there are some outliers like FirstCry’s Supam Maheshwari who took home Rs 200.7 crores and Slice’s Rajan Bajaj whose annual salary was Rs 12 only.
This analysis includes managerial remuneration of 114 Indian unicorns announced as of March 2024.
Do these salaries vary by sector?
Yes, in fact the median founder salary for Media & Entertainment sector unicorns was as high as Rs 3.5 crores in FY23, followed by Rs 1.9 crores for Logistics unicorn, and Rs 1.6 crores in Edtech.
In terms of average, we see Logistics unicorns at the top with Rs 12.4 cr average salary which could be because of some outliers as the median is much lower for the sector. The top 7 sectors (by count of unicorns) were picked from our list of 114 unicorns.
We also saw salaries vary by location. The top 6 cities (by count of unicorns) were picked from our list of 114 unicorns. Pune unicorn founders were found to have the highest average and median salary of Rs 20 crores and Rs 3.7 crores respectively.
The city’s average has shot up because of the FirstCry founder’s remuneration.
What about gender, do founder salaries vary by gender?
We saw a vast gap between the median salary of male and female unicorn founders. On average, male founders earned 8x more than female founders.
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India’s Comprehensive Private Markets Intelligence Platform, PrivateCircle Research.
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(Data analysis by Sumanjan Kumar CS, Chethan HS, Pratheek Kumar, Rakshitha R, Sakshi Joshi)