Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Thursday said deposits close to $1 billion attributable to Indian start-ups were with the US-based Silicon Valley Bank.
The failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), which was a key funding source for start-ups, has sent shockwaves across the global financial system.
During a Twitter live session, Chandrasekhar said he heard that over $200 million of start-ups' deposits have been transferred to GIFT City bank.
"I had kind of very empirically and anecdotally calculated that there were more than a billion dollars of start-ups' capital as deposits. According to some, this is a conservative estimate. There were deposits in SVB that are attributable to Indian start-ups close to a billion or more," the Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology said.
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Chandrasekhar also said that he has taken up the issue of SVB failure with the Finance Minister on Wednesday and pitched for fine-tuning the Indian banking system as per the requirement of start-ups.
Responding to a query, he said the country's semiconductor journey is going to begin in 2023.
"We are going to ground break a fab (chip-making plant). We are going to create packaging units in India and by the end of the financial year 2023, I think, there will be more than 50-55 design start-ups that are doing device design," Chandrasekhar said.