ETech Aces Marketing and Consulting Pvt. Ltd., which operates online insurance selling platform - PolicyBazaar.com and a lending platform – PaisaBazaar.com, has recently made its entry to the ‘unicorn club’ of India’s tech startups. A unicorn is a privately-held startup valued at $1 billion or more.

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PolicyBazaar raised about $200 million of capital in a fresh round of funding led by Softbank Vision Fund. According to various media reports the capital infusion has valued PolicyBazaar at $1 billion. The entry of PolicyBazaar on the list of Unicorns comes just one day after online food delivery startup Swiggy also attained the Unicorn status.

Swiggy has raised around $210 million in a fresh round of funding from South African technology conglomerate Naspers and DST Global. The deal valued Swiggy above $1 billion.

There have been three entries in the club so far in the year 2018. Apart from PolicyBazaar and Swiggy, Paytm Ecommerce also became a Unicorn in April 2018 when it raised around $400 million from Softbank and Chinese ecommerce major Alibaba at an estimated valuation of little less than $2 billion.

Ad-tech startup InMobi was the first Indian startup to become a Unicorn in the year 2010. Since then, there have been more than 15 startups reaching the $1 billion valuation mark.

However, most of these startups have managed to withstand their ‘Unicorn’ but few of them lost the plot which resulted into valuation cuts in their subsequent funding rounds, thus, lost the unicorn status.

For instance, data analytics startup MuSigma which became Unicorn in 2013, is currently valued at below $1 billion.

Similarly, ecommerce portal Snapdeal, which joined the Unicorn Club in 2014 along with another ecommerce major Flipkart, also lost its Unicorn status as it struggled to get a valuation of $1 billion during the talks of a merger with Flipkart.

Online classifieds startup, Quikr was also recently valued at $0.88 million when its investor AB Kinnevik cut their estimate of Quikr’s valuation by 12 percent.

First Published:Jun 26, 2018 7:41 PM IST