Highlights
• Top 10 celebrity investors in India, ranked by number of disclosed funding rounds between 2021 and 2026 YTD, have collectively participated in 49 disclosed funding rounds across 34 startups, worth ~$460M in total round value.
• Shilpa Shetty Kundra leads the list with 10 disclosed rounds, followed by MS Dhoni and Sachin Tendulkar with 6 rounds each, and Shraddha Kapoor and Virat Kohli with 5 rounds each.
• Repeat backing is common: in 9 instances a celebrity invested in the same company across multiple rounds, together making up 22 of the 49 total rounds, led by Sachin Tendulkar’s five rounds in Spinny and Shilpa Shetty Kundra’s three rounds in WickedGud.
• Five portfolio companies have already reached a public listing or acquisition, including Mamaearth and Klassroom on the public markets and Ed-a-Mamma and Shunya acquired by Reliance alongside unicorn Spinny and soonicorns Sugar Cosmetics and XYXX.
Sep, 2026 — Tracxn, the global market intelligence platform for private company data, today released Notable Celebrity Investors Shaping India’s Startup Ecosystem (2021–2026 YTD), a listicle featuring the 10 celebrities with the highest number of disclosed startup investment rounds in India, ranked by round count.
The ranking considers funding rounds raised by India-headquartered startups between 1 January 2021 and 2026 YTD, in which at least one of the 10 featured celebrities participated as an investor, with only disclosed-amount rounds included. Celebrities are ranked by the total number of individual disclosed funding rounds they participated in. The listicle covers companies across food & beverage, beauty & personal care, fashion, mobility, and other consumer categories, reflecting the breadth of sectors celebrity capital has reached across India’s startup ecosystem.
Of the 49 rounds, 27 (55%) are Angel or Seed and 13 are Series A, reflecting how early celebrity capital tends to enter these companies. The 34 companies are spread across Maharashtra, Haryana, Karnataka, and Delhi, and span a range of maturity stages, from early-stage minicorns to Spinny, the cohort’s sole unicorn, alongside soonicorns Sugar Cosmetics and XYXX.
About Tracxn
Tracxn Technologies Ltd. is a data intelligence platform for private market research, tracking 9+ million entities through 3000+ feeds categorized across industries, sub-sectors, geographies, and networks globally. It has become one of the leading providers of private company data and ranks among the top five players globally in terms of the number of companies and web domains profiled.
Media Contacts: Sahib Mendiratta
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Barsilona Dikshit
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Tracxn Technologies Ltd.
Bangalore, India
Email: pr@tracxn.com
Website: tracxn.com
