A startup or start-up is started by individual founders or entrepreneurs to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. More specifically, a startup is a newly emerged business venture that aims to develop a viable business model to meet a marketplace need or problem. Founders design startups to effectively develop and validate a scalable business model. Hence, the concepts of startups and entrepreneurship are similar. However, entrepreneurship refers all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend to grow big or become registered, while startups refer to new businesses that intend to grow beyond the solo founder, have employees, and intend to grow large. Start-ups face high uncertainty and do have high rates of failure, but the minority that goes on to be successful companies have the potential to become large and influential. Some of the startups become unicorns, i.e. privately held start-up companies valued at over $1 billion. According to Tech Crunch, there were 279 unicorns as of March 2018, with most of the unicorns located in China, followed by the United States. The largest unicorns founded as of October 2018 included Ant Financial, Byte Dance, Didi Chuxing, Uber, Xiaomi, and Airbnb.

Indian startups are predictable to have raised $38.3 billion in support in 2018, behind only the US and China, a report by Y startups said Thursday. Flipkart's $16 billion deal with American retailer Walmart accounted for the biggest piece of the pie, followed by Swiggy raising about $1.3 billion over three deals, and OYO picking up $1 billion in 2018, the report said.

Other big backing deals included those by Paytm Mall ($895 million), ReNew Power ($495 million), Byju's ($422 million) and Zomato ($410 million).

Around 1,000 deals were signed by Indian startups in 2018 with areas like e-commerce, fintech, sustainability and renewable energy, transport and logistics, strength and wellness, and travel and sightseeing attracting the highest investments, it added.

"There has been a dramatic rise of startup funding for Indian startups. Asia has emerged as a key candidate for startups globally, beating the Americas and Europe. In 2018, startups in Asia raised $172 billion, compared to $162.9 billion in Americas and $46.2 billion in Europe," Y startups CEO Jappreet Sethi said.

Globally, about 14,300 funding deals were struck by startups in 2018, raising over $400 billion, an increase of more than 23 percent from the previous year, the report said.

It added that over 3,700 seed funding deals (totaling $6.9 billion) were struck, while 7,357 venture funding deals ranging from series A to Series I were signed in 2018 to raise $217.9 billion.