Thirty-seven.
That’s how many startups shut down in India today. Not this month. Not this quarter. Today. While you were reading this morning’s emails, checking your Slack, reviewing yesterday’s numbers — thirty-seven founders somewhere in this country were closing the door on something they built.
In the first ten months of 2025, 11,223 Indian startups ceased operations. That’s a 30% jump from 8,649 closures in 2024. And 2024 was already considered a brutal year.
These aren’t just numbers in a Nasscom report. Each one represents someone who convinced investors, hired a team, stayed up fixing things that broke at midnight, and at some point reached a moment where continuing was no longer possible.
We’ve been in the risk business for over two decades. We’ve seen how disruption works — not from the outside, reading headlines about funding winters and market corrections — but from the inside, sitting across the table from people whose lives were structured around a venture that no longer exists. And what we see in startup failures follows a pattern that the ecosystem talks about in public and ignores in practice.
Every accelerator pitch deck, every VC blog post, every startup post-mortem on LinkedIn covers the same five reasons. They’re accurate. They matter. And they’re thoroughly taught in every programme worth attending.
Forty-two percent of startups fail because nobody wanted what they built. The product-market fit problem. They built first, validated later, and discovered too late that the market had moved on — or had never been there. CB Insights has been tracking this for years, and the number barely changes.
Twenty-nine percent ran out of money. The burn rate exceeded the runway. The next round didn’t materialise. In 2025, total startup funding in India dropped 17% to $10.5 billion. Seed funding fell 30%. The era of “raise first, figure it out later” ended somewhere around 2023, and the consequences are still arriving.
Twenty-three percent had the wrong team. Co-founder disputes, early hires who didn’t scale, culture problems that metastasised. The team that starts the company is almost never the team that scales it, and the transition is where many ventures fracture.
Then competition — entering a crowded market without a genuine differentiator. Then regulatory surprises — GST changes, compliance requirements, licensing challenges that weren’t in the original business plan.
These are business failures with business explanations. They have business solutions — better validation frameworks, leaner operating models, smarter hiring, more disciplined capital allocation. Accelerator programmes teach these well. That’s what they’re designed for.
But there’s a category of failure that doesn’t appear in any autopsy. It doesn’t get written about on LinkedIn. It doesn’t show up in CB Insights data. And it’s the one that hits women founders disproportionately hard.
Not the business. The founder.
A 2024 survey of 156 founders found that 53% had experienced burnout within the past year. A separate study reported that 85% experienced high stress, 55% suffered insomnia, 39% reported depression. Nearly half — 49% — said they were considering quitting their startup entirely. These aren’t outliers complaining on Twitter. These are the founders still in the game, still running their companies, still showing up to board meetings. The ones who already left aren’t in the survey at all.
In India, the picture is sharper. Ninety percent of startups fail within five years. Women-led startups receive less than 2% of total venture funding. There are over 7,000 active women-led startups in the country, but the ecosystem that supports them — accelerators, incubators, mentorship programmes — is almost entirely focused on business mechanics. How to pitch. How to raise. How to build a product. How to acquire customers.
Nobody teaches the founder how to survive the moment when her own life disrupts the plan.
Here’s what that looks like in practice. These are composites — drawn from real conversations across two decades of working in risk. Names and details are changed. The patterns are exact.
Kavita ran a SaaS company with eleven employees. She’d raised a seed round eighteen months earlier and was approaching the metrics she needed for a Series A conversation. Then her mother had a stroke.
Kavita became the primary caregiver overnight. Her father was alive but couldn’t manage the medical decisions, the hospital logistics, the rehabilitation planning. Her brother lived in Bangalore; she was in Pune. For six weeks, Kavita was in the hospital more than she was in the office.
Her co-founder held things together, but the product roadmap slipped. Two key hires — already in the pipeline — fell through because nobody was there to close them. The Series A conversation, which was weeks away, got pushed by a quarter. Then another quarter. The investors didn’t say no. They said “let’s revisit when things stabilise.” That was worse.
By the time Kavita was back full-time, the window had shifted. The competitive landscape had moved. A rival had launched a feature that her team had been building. The company survived — it’s still operating today — but it never recovered the momentum of that quarter. And Kavita still hasn’t addressed the fact that she has no income replacement, no personal health cover independent of the company, and no separation between her savings and the company’s bank account.
Ritu left her job at a large IT services company to co-found an edtech startup. She was 34, healthy, running half-marathons, and completely focused on the launch.
What she didn’t think about — because nobody told her to — was that her employer’s group health policy lapsed on her last working day. No grace period. No continuation. No notification. She’d been covered by that policy for eight years. She’d never thought about health insurance once in that time because it was just there.
Seven months into the startup, Ritu needed surgery. Not an emergency — a planned procedure for a condition she’d been managing. Under her old employer policy, it would have been fully covered. Without it, she paid Rs 4.2 lakh out of pocket. That was the company’s marketing budget for the quarter.
Ritu’s edtech startup is still running. But that Rs 4.2 lakh wasn’t a medical expense. It was a business decision she was forced to make because nobody — not her previous employer’s HR, not her co-founder, not her accelerator programme, not her CA — had flagged that her health cover would disappear the day she resigned.
Ananya ran a design consultancy — just her and two contractors. Revenue was growing. Clients were good. She was profitable in her second year, which put her ahead of most startups by any measure.
Her problem wasn’t the business. It was the structure underneath it. Or rather, the complete absence of structure.
Ananya’s business account and personal account were the same account. Her savings — what she thought of as her emergency fund — were also the company’s operating capital. When a major client delayed payment by 60 days (which happens routinely in consulting), Ananya couldn’t pay her rent on time. Not because the business was failing. Because the business’s cash flow and her personal cash flow were the same thing, and when one hiccupped, both collapsed.
She also had no professional indemnity insurance. No personal accident cover. No home insurance. Her entire financial existence was one entity — her, the business, the bank account — with no partitions, no buffers, no separation between what the business owned and what she owned.
It’s worth being direct about this: the gap isn’t because programme managers don’t care. It’s because founder personal risk sits outside the traditional scope of business mentorship.
Accelerators teach market validation, product development, fundraising, team building, go-to-market strategy. That’s their job. They do it well. The best programmes in India — and there are genuinely excellent ones — produce founders who understand their business inside out.
But a founder’s personal infrastructure — her health cover, her income continuity, her financial separation from her business, her family’s stability if she can’t show up for three months — isn’t a business topic. It’s a personal topic. And personal topics don’t make it into cohort curricula because they feel like they belong somewhere else.
The problem is that “somewhere else” doesn’t exist. Her CA handles taxes. Her lawyer handles contracts. Her mentor handles strategy. Nobody handles the question: what happens to you — not your business, you — if something goes sideways for 90 days?
The programmes that are beginning to add risk-readiness to their curriculum aren’t doing it because it’s fashionable. They’re doing it because they’ve watched cohort members drop out mid-programme for reasons that had nothing to do with their business model. A health event. A family crisis. A financial shock that could have been absorbed if there had been any structure underneath it.
The data on this is uncomfortably clear.
Women make up 13.2% of startup founders globally. In India, over 73,000 startups have at least one woman director, but women-led ventures receive less than 2% of venture capital. All-female founding teams globally received just 1% of total VC funding in 2024.
These are funding numbers. They tell one story. But there’s a second story underneath — the one about what happens to women founders when the personal and the professional collide.
Women founders are more likely to be primary caregivers alongside running their business. More likely to have left stable employment — and its associated health cover — to start their venture. More likely to have their personal savings entangled with their business capital. More likely to be managing household financial obligations — EMIs, school fees, parent support — from the same income stream that the business produces.
When a male founder’s mother has a stroke, he is statistically more likely to have a spouse or sibling who steps into the caregiving role. When a woman founder’s mother has a stroke, she is statistically more likely to become the primary caregiver herself. This isn’t commentary. This is the lived reality that shows up in cohort attrition data that nobody publishes.
A woman founder who takes three months out of her business for a health event, a family crisis, or burnout doesn’t just lose three months of momentum. She often loses the confidence of investors who were already on the fence, the momentum of a team that was already stretched, and the financial buffer that was already thin. The recovery curve is steeper because the starting position was more precarious.
This is the risk that nobody teaches. Not because it’s invisible — it’s glaringly obvious to anyone who’s worked with women founders for any length of time — but because it falls between the cracks of what accelerators do, what advisors do, and what insurance companies do.
It’s not a workshop about insurance products. Nobody wants that, and it wouldn’t help.
It’s a practical session — 90 minutes — where each founder in the cohort maps her own situation across six areas: health, income, life, home, business, and future.
She answers questions about her actual life. Not her pitch deck. Not her cap table. Her life. How she works. Who depends on her. What would actually happen if she couldn’t show up for 90 days. Whether her health cover is portable or employer-dependent. Whether her savings are hers or the company’s. Whether her home is insured. Whether anyone in her family could access funds if she were hospitalised.
She leaves with three things. A score — an honest picture of how protected she is right now. A map — where the gaps are, specific to her situation. And three actions — things to do this week, not this quarter.
Some of those actions cost nothing. Open a separate bank account for personal savings. Check what your health policy actually excludes. Calculate your monthly floor — the minimum you need coming in for your life not to fracture. Map the overlap between your personal and business finances.
Others involve putting mechanisms in place. A portable health policy in your own name — not dependent on any employer or any startup surviving. A personal accident policy with an income replacement component — so if you can’t work, something comes in. A home cover that costs less than your monthly Swiggy bill. Professional indemnity if you’re client-facing.
None of this is complicated. All of it is specific. And almost none of it happens unless someone creates the space for it — because founders, by definition, are too busy building to build underneath themselves.
Thirty-seven startups shut down today. Thirty-seven will shut down tomorrow. The day after that, thirty-seven more.
Some of those founders had bad ideas. Some had bad timing. Some had bad luck with investors, with markets, with regulations that changed under their feet.
And some had a business that was working — genuinely working — until the founder’s personal infrastructure gave way underneath it. A health event that became a financial event. A family crisis that became a business crisis. A gap in coverage that became a gap in capability.
These aren’t hypothetical failures. They’re the ones that keep programme managers up at night — the cohort member who was on track, who had the product, the traction, the team — and then disappeared. Not because the market rejected her. Because life happened, and there was nothing between her and the floor.
That’s the gap we built AVYA to close. One founder at a time. One cohort at a time. Before the wall shows up — not after.
If you run a programme, an accelerator, an incubator, or a community for women founders, and you’ve seen this pattern in your cohorts, we should talk. One conversation. We’ll map what your founders need and what a risk-readiness session looks like for your specific programme.
Because thirty-seven is tomorrow’s number too. And some of them don’t have to be.
Bring risk-readiness to your next cohort.
Invite AVYA to Your Programme → Explore Founder Protection →The biggest unaddressed risk is the founder’s personal infrastructure — her health cover, income continuity, financial separation from her business, and her family’s stability if she can’t show up for three months. When a founder’s personal life is disrupted by illness, a family crisis, or burnout, it can collapse a business that was working perfectly well. This risk doesn’t appear in any startup autopsy, but it affects women founders disproportionately.
A founder’s employer group health policy lapses on her last working day — no grace period, no automatic continuation. This catches many women founders off guard because the cover was simply always there while employed. A personal health policy bought while still employed avoids this gap entirely and typically costs Rs 18,000 to Rs 25,000 per year for comprehensive individual cover.
Accelerators are designed to teach business mechanics — market validation, fundraising, product development, team building. Founder personal risk sits outside that traditional scope. Her CA handles taxes, her lawyer handles contracts, her mentor handles strategy — but nobody handles the question of what happens to her, not her business, if something goes sideways for 90 days. This gap is structural, not intentional.
It’s a 90-minute practical session where each founder maps her own situation across six areas: health, income, life, home, business, and future. She leaves with a score (how protected she is now), a map (where the gaps are, specific to her situation), and three actions to take that week. Some actions cost nothing — open a separate personal account, check what your health policy excludes, calculate your monthly floor. Others involve putting mechanisms in place, like a portable health policy or personal accident cover with income replacement.