What India’s best- and worst-performing startup stocks of 2025 reveal

If 2021 was the year Indian startups sold ambition to private markets, 2025 was when public markets demanded answers. After years of valuation excesses, capital tightened, IPO scrutiny intensified, and listed markets emerged as the ultimate judge of business quality and durability.

The performance of India’s most prominent listed internet and new-age technology companies this year reflects a decisive shift away from flashy, growth-at-all-costs narratives towards operational clarity, consistent unit economics, and category leadership.

Every strong performer in 2025 offered either visible profitability or a credible, time-bound path to it. Also, focused businesses consistently outperformed those chasing multiple adjacent opportunities.

Standout winners: execution beats hype

At the top of the leaderboard is Ather Energy—the strongest performer of 2025—with its stock gaining a massive ~132% year-to-date. Investor optimism has been driven by improving margins, a clearer EV adoption curve, and visible progress toward scale without runaway cash burn.

The market’s message is unambiguous: EV stories must now resemble sustainable industrial businesses, not just vision decks. Ather’s tighter cost controls and clearly articulated scale-up roadmap have resonated at a time when markets are deeply sceptical of long-horizon profitability promises.

Close behind is Meesho, the year’s most talked-about large IPO. The stock’s near-doubling—about 95% gains post-listing—reflected investor confidence in a sharply differentiated model built on low-cost social commerce, asset-light logistics, and disciplined customer acquisition.

Meesho’s rally was particularly notable because it challenges the long-held assumption that Indian ecommerce must bleed endlessly to grow. The gains have, of course, stabilised to about 11% year-to-date.

Meanwhile, beauty and fashion platform Nykaa staged one of the market’s cleanest recoveries, posting year-to-date gains of 54%. Once emblematic of post-IPO disappointment, Nykaa’s 2025 performance underscored how predictable cash flows, private-label margins, strong brand equity, and omnichannel depth can rebuild market confidence—even in consumer internet categories once written off as “overvalued”.

Fintech’s visible bifurcation

Among fintechs, the separation between survivors and strugglers was stark. One97 Communications (Paytm) delivered solid gains of over 34% year-to-date, as its losses narrowed and the path to sustainable profitability became clearer. The stock’s impressive returns reflect a broader recalibration: fintech valuations are now driven less by user numbers and more by compliance credibility, take-rate stability, and cross-sell monetisation.

That shift also benefited Groww, whose 43% post-listing gains and rapid ascent to a nearly Rs 1 lakh crore market capitalisation signalled investor confidence in fintechs that are taking on incumbents in broking and wealth management with capital-efficient models.

Post the IPO, Groww saw short-term rallies, including consecutive sessions of 20% gains, driven by investor optimism. It currently sits on a year-to-date gain of nearly 25%. Analyst buy ratings and expectations of strong earnings growth reflect confidence in its strategy to expand beyond basic broking into higher-margin wealth and financial services. 

Groww’s performance also illustrates how platforms with clear monetisation pathways, defensible market share, and regulatory discipline can command premium valuations, even in crowded categories.

Weaker performances among other fintech-adjacent names further down the rankings underline how unforgiving the markets have become. The era when “payments scale” alone could justify lofty valuations is over. Investors now demand repeat monetisation from loyal users, not optional monetisation from occasional ones.

How the category plays stacked up

For companies operating in execution-heavy, margin-thin sectors, positive 2025 returns stemmed not from explosive growth, but from tighter execution, supply rationalisation, and improved unit economics.

Delhivery’s steady recovery (gains over 18%), in particular, signals renewed investor comfort with logistics tech—provided capacity expansion remains disciplined, and pricing power improves. This has clear implications for B2B and infrastructure-heavy startups eyeing public markets.

Meanwhile, PhysicsWallah—despite a strong listing—is down 13.6% year-to-date. However, its market cap hovers around Rs 40,000 crore, and its post-IPO rally was striking not only because edtech had been deeply out of favour, but because it reflected renewed investor willingness to back companies that showed growth with disciplined execution. 

Investor confidence in PW rests on three pillars: sustained revenue growth, narrowing losses with visibility into profitability, and a hybrid online-offline model that has reduced dependence on pure digital acquisition and stabilised unit economics.

Urban Company, on the other hand, is down more than 25% year-to-date. One of the biggest near-term drags on the stock has been technical selling pressure after lock-in periods expired. This supply overhang pushed the stock to fresh lows, and despite being above the IPO price, the company’s listing gains have largely reversed. 

Additionally, UC’s quarterly results showed a loss in Q2 FY26, which contrasts with earlier profitability gains and raises questions about margin sustainability. Analysts note uncertainties in unit economics, implying that the business may still struggle to convert growth into steady, high-quality profits.

Consumer internet stabilises

Further down the list, companies such as Honasa Consumer (Mamaearth) posted modest gains of around 7% year-to-date. This stock neither excited nor alarmed investors, and in 2025, that counted as a quiet win amid a broader consumption slowdown.

Markets are increasingly valuing D2C and brand-led startups, like FMCG businesses, prioritising predictability and margin stability over viral growth or topline acceleration.

At the large-cap end, Zomato (now operating under Eternal) posted muted gains of about 3.5%, not due to business weakness but because expectations are largely priced in. For mega platforms, 2025 was about defending margins rather than driving re-ratings.

Eternal’s valuation, however, rose 27% to over Rs 3 lakh crore, placing it among the top 25 stocks in the Nifty 50.

Swiggy, meanwhile, was down almost 27% year-to-date, with investor frustrations growing around the foodtech’s continuous losses. In Q1 FY26, the company reported a significant net loss (~Rs 1,197 crore), almost double the year-ago loss, even though revenue grew ~54% year-on-year. 

The broad market perception remains that profitability remains elusive, with margins pressured by cost-intensive growth strategies, as Swiggy goes all out to compete with its fast-growing peers in quick commerce.

The operational laggards

At the bottom of the rankings, sharp underperformance by Ola Electric and Brainbees Solutions (FirstCry) highlights where market patience has snapped. High capital intensity, execution missteps, and opaque profitability timelines are now punished swiftly.

Ola Electric has been one of the harshest lessons of 2025 for public-market investors. Its stock is down roughly 62% year-to-date, erasing much of its post-IPO value and shrinking its market capitalisation to around Rs 15,000 crore by late December. Founder share sales, repeated 52-week lows, and volatile quarterly performance have further dented sentiment.

Ola’s trajectory reinforces a blunt market verdict: in 2025, growth alone no longer justifies valuation—capital discipline does.

FirstCry, despite having a strong brand recall and an omnichannel footprint spanning online and physical stores, has also struggled to convince investors that scale can translate into durable margins. Persistent operating losses, pricing pressure, and the inherently low-margin nature of consumer retail have capped enthusiasm.

Its weak stock performance (down more than 54% year-to-date) reflects broader underperformance among small-cap and retail-category listings. FirstCry is among the top double-digit decliners in the BSE 500’s new-age cohort, underscoring how traditional ecommerce models are now valued more like cyclical consumer businesses than high-growth tech plays. (Nykaa remains a rare exception.)