On this National Startup Day, it is natural to look back and celebrate how far we have come. India today is home to the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem. We have built thousands of high-growth companies, dozens of listed digital enterprises, a generation of venture-backed firms that employ millions of people, created globally competitive products, and served consumers and businesses at national scale. Entrepreneurship in India has turned into a mainstream career choice, rather than a leap into the unknown. All of this is real. And all of it is also just the beginning.

If one looks carefully at the economic and technological machinery now in place, a clear conclusion emerges: over the next decade, the New Age Economy will move from being a promising sector of GDP to one of the primary engines of Indian growth. It is my view that over the next 10 years, Indian startups are poised to generate more than a trillion dollars in new market capitalisation and multiple $100-billion companies are likely to emerge, not as exceptions, but as a natural outcome of how India is now structured.

This will sound improbable to many today, just as India producing large scale technology companies once sounded improbable. But in hindsight it will look inevitable. Every major economic power has had a phase where technology stopped being a supporting tool and became a foundational layer of the economy. In the United States, software did not simply create successful companies; it rewired how people shop through Amazon, how businesses sell using Salesforce, how advertising works through Google, how logistics is optimised through data-driven supply chains, and how capital is allocated through digital markets. What we now think of as Big Tech is really economic infrastructure built in code. India is now entering that same phase, but at far greater scale and speed. Over the last decade, we used technology largely to build service platforms across e-commerce, digital payments, ride-hailing, food delivery and SaaS. These platforms were necessary as they created employment, formalised consumption, and brought millions of businesses and consumers online. They proved that we can build and operate platforms at national scale and bring about efficiency. But these are only the foundation.

The next decade will be defined by Indian startups as they embed themselves into supply chains, credit, manufacturing, healthcare, energy, logistics and global technology exports. We are moving from using technology to run businesses to technology becoming the business. This means, amongst much more, AI-driven credit underwriting replacing manual lending, computer vision and robotics transforming warehouses and factories, genomics and data science reshaping drug discovery, distributed energy platforms optimising how power is produced and consumed, and emerging space-tech companies building launch vehicles, satellites and earth-observation platforms that serve global markets. This is how a logistics startup becomes a national trade network, how a fintech becomes the backbone of SME credit, and how a healthtech platform evolves into a biotech company solving global health issues. That is where a trillion dollars of value will get created. The headline number sounds bold until one looks at the underlying arithmetic. And yes, all this is going to happen in India, because we already see the brightest minds in the country in the formative stages of working on these problem statements - many of them will succeed in a major way.

India already processes more than ₹200 lakh crore of digital payments annually on UPI. We have close to 900 million internet users and the world’s largest base of small businesses coming into the mainstream through GST, marketplaces and SaaS platforms. We now have domestic capital markets that are funding technology companies which are no longer reliant on just foreign venture capital. When digital platforms, AI, data, hardware, and new-age energy technologies become embedded in commerce, finance, logistics and production, value multiplies quickly. Over the next decade, it is entirely reasonable to expect hundreds of billions of dollars of value to be created across digital commerce, brand-led retail and marketplaces; hundreds of billions across SaaS, fintech, logistics technology and credit infrastructure; tens of billions across AI-driven productivity platforms; and tens of billions across energy, healthcare, life sciences and deep-tech. This is not one big bet. It is many compounding industries growing on the same digital and technological foundation.

What makes India uniquely positioned for this is not just the size of its market, but the quality of its digital public infrastructure. Aadhaar has made identity frictionless. UPI has made money programmable. GST has created a real-time map of commerce. Account Aggregators and ONDC are opening up credit and markets. These are not applications; they are economic highways. The Indian government deserves enormous credit for building these rails decisively, patiently and at national scale, creating a public digital backbone that private entrepreneurs can now innovate on. In most countries, startups must build their own rails before they can innovate. In India, founders are building on top of national rails. That allows competition to be intense, innovation to be fast, and scale to be extraordinary. When millions of businesses, banks, logistics providers and consumers are plugged into the same digital backbone, new companies do not grow linearly. They grow exponentially.

This shift is also being driven by a new generation of Indian founders. The early startup era produced entrepreneurs who proved something was possible, often under conditions of capital scarcity and institutional uncertainty. Many built with an eye toward survival or a reasonable exit. The next generation is different. These founders have grown up alongside scaled technology platforms. They have seen what national and global leadership looks like. They are not building to sell; they are building to endure. These are not nimble small ideas struggling with scarcity. They are becoming the backbone of India’s economic and technological leadership.

Three powerful flywheels are now reinforcing each other. The first is talent. India produces more engineers, scientists, product managers and technology-literate professionals than almost any country in the world. The second is capital. Indian public markets and domestic investors are now a stable source of funding for technology companies, reducing dependence on global cycles. The third is scale. With 1.4 billion people and a vast range of consumer and business needs, India offers a test bed unlike any other in the world. If it works in the complexity of India, it will work anywhere. When these three flywheels connect, leadership is no longer a matter of luck. It becomes a matter of time.

For years, Indian startups were rightly celebrated for being efficient and frugal. That was necessary when capital was scarce. But efficiency is a survival trait. Ambition is a leadership trait. The next decade will belong to founders who build not just to operate well in India, but to be the best in the world in their category. This is the moment to stop playing small. Ten years from now, India’s stock markets will look very different. Many of the most valuable companies will not be industrial conglomerates but technology-driven platforms in AI, digital commerce, financial infrastructure, life sciences, clean energy and global software that did not exist a decade earlier. That is how economic revolutions always unfold: slowly at first, and then all at once. India’s New Age Economy is no longer a side story. It is becoming the main one. India’s first Trillion Dollar Techade has started. It will not be the last.