Fewer IIT and IIM Alumni Are Founding Startups in 2026

Only 79 IIT alumni and 20 IIM alumni founded technology startups between January and August 2026 — against 307 and 71, respectively, for all of 2025. That's the core finding of a report The Economic Times published on Saturday, citing data from Tracxn, and it lands in a year when India's startup engine is actually speeding up.

India saw 6,353 technology startups founded up to August 2026, compared with 3,969 during the whole of 2025, the report said. So the country is on pace to nearly double last year's formation rate. Yet the pipeline of founders from the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management is thinning, not growing.

One caveat matters here: the 2026 figures cover only eight months, so they're not directly comparable with full-year 2025 numbers. Even so, the pace would need to roughly quadruple over the final four months for IIT founders to match last year's total. That gap is the story.

What does the divergence mean?

The split between overall startup formation and elite-institution founders points to a shift in career choices among highly qualified graduates, the report suggested. More startups are being born — but fewer of them carry an IIT or IIM stamp on the cap table.

Vikram Gupta, founder and managing partner of IvyCap Ventures, told ET the increase in startup formation was encouraging, but the limited participation of IIT and IIM alumni indicated that a substantial pool of talent remained untapped. He said entrepreneurship needed to become a more viable career option for a wider pool of talent if India was to build enduring companies.

In plain terms: the talent exists, the ventures exist, but the two aren't connecting at the top of the pedigree ladder.

How big is the elite-founder base overall?

The long-run picture still favors the IITs — by a wide margin. Of the 196,704 technology startups tracked in India as of August 2026:

• 6,147 had at least one IIT founder
• 2,102 had at least one IIM founder

IIT alumni, in other words, appear as founders at nearly three times the rate of IIM graduates across the tracked universe.

Neha Singh, co-founder of Tracxn, said the larger presence of IIT alumni reflected the size of their alumni base and the engineering and deep-tech orientation of technology startups. Technical founders often initiate ventures, she said, with business expertise from IIM graduates and other professionals coming in as companies expand.

That sequencing — engineers first, MBAs later — may partly explain why IIM founder counts run lower in the earliest-stage data. It may also mean the 2026 IIM figure understates business-school involvement in companies founded earlier.

Why does this matter for India's startup economy?

The numbers frame a real tension for investors and policymakers. Startup formation is accelerating: 6,353 new tech ventures in eight months is a record pace for the Tracxn-tracked universe. But if graduates from India's most selective institutions are stepping back from founding, the question is where the next generation of "enduring companies" — Gupta's phrase — will come from, and who will build them.

The data doesn't answer whether elite graduates are choosing corporate jobs, foreign postings, or later-stage executive roles over founding. It only shows the founder counts diverging from the formation curve. The takeaway in one line: India is creating more startups than ever, but fewer of its most credentialed graduates are signing on as founders.