India’s IT capital and startup hub Bengaluru has been ranked as the second best city in the world in terms of launching tech startups.
A UK based research platform has compiled a list of cities applying some key parameters, like internet speed, cost of living, infrastructure score, availability of investors, valuation that the tech startups are able to notch up and so on. Their evaluation has found that after Boulder, in the USA, Bengaluru is the second most attractive spot.
As per the report, the city has the following stats: The average internet speed is 11Mbps, hosts 7504 startups (startups registered and having their main operations in the city) and attract an average valuation of $3.4 million and there are 6236 investors in startups from this city.
These findings follow another report appearing earlier which had placed Bengaluru in the 19th spot when it comes to the cities being hi-tech and offers around 22% of all jobs in the technology category.
While private enterprise is largely behind these accomplishments, it must also be acknowledged that the government in the state of Karnataka has been taking many initiatives to promote the startup environment, allocating funds. The state has set itself a target of supporting 20,000 startups in the tech sector by the year 2020 and a corpus of $47.3 million has been set aside for this.
In another move, the state has designated a project ELEVATE100, which is aimed at picking the best 100 startups and shepherd them to their next level of business operations.
Even in the breakthrough technology involving blockchain, the city has the highest number of jobs, 36% of them on job sites like Indeed.
Apart from Boulder and Bengaluru, some of the other preferred cities figuring in the study include Johannesburg in South Africa, Stockholm, Sweden and Santiago, Chile.
However, there is still a long way to the top for Bengaluru with its average internet speed of 11mbps comparing poorly with 65mbps recorded in a city like Houston. The government may have to come up with some solutions to the other civic issues being faced in the city including its slow-moving traffic.