Inside India’s Queer Startup Ecosystem

In a country where Section 377 was decriminalised barely seven years ago, in 2018, queer entrepreneurs are quietly yet boldly rewriting the rules of business. From Delhi's nightlife to Bengaluru’s cafe culture, from fermentation studios to gender-neutral fashion labels, they're building ventures that challenge not just market norms but the very foundations of how businesses are imagined, sustained, and scaled.

"In the current economic climate, everyone's an ally until they have to back it up," says Samarth Khanna from Kaleshkari, a gender neutral fashion label, highlighting the gap between performative support and material commitment. Their stories reveal a landscape where identity isn't decorative, it's structural, shaping everything from product design to investment pitches, from community economics to the daily negotiations of simply existing in India’s heteronormative marketplace.

When Identity Informs Enterprise

For queer founders in India, business begins with a deeply personal absence. Vikas Narula, co-founder of Depot 48, articulates this precisely, "When my brother-in-law and I opened Depot, it came from a very real absence, there weren't enough spaces where queer people could gather without bracing themselves. Not just at night, not just during Pride, but as part of everyday life."

This isn't about rainbow logos or Pride Month campaigns. It's about fundamentally reimagining what a business can be. Samarth discovered that queer politics led them to confront India's size chart crisis. "Sixty per cent of people don't fit into standard size charts at all. If I expand the definition of queer and really go to the politics, then all of these 60 per cent of people who don't fit the standard size charts are being wronged and are being othered."

The fashion industry, paradoxically, offers queer founders a unique entry point. As Samarth observes, "Fashion is one space where the queer folk are making money and they're also trusted with the craft." Yet this trust remains fragile, often conditional on how visibly queer founders choose to be with their politics and representation.

The thread connecting these ventures is clear: queerness as methodology, not marketing. Swati Singh from The Farm Bazpur, a homegrown cheese and ferments brand, describes fermentation as "the culinary embodiment of queerness, because natural cheesemaking, fermenting natural hot sauce, these kinds of things are very microbe-led, and it's not one microbe that's doing this work, it's an entire community." When identity shapes process rather than packaging, businesses become fundamentally different organisms, community-driven, coalition-oriented, and structurally resistant to mainstream categorisation.

The Invisible Barriers And Economic Realities Beyond the Pitch Deck

India's startup ecosystem rarely accounts for the specific friction queer entrepreneurs face. Whilst mainstream narratives celebrate unicorns and venture capital, queer founders navigate a different terrain entirely. Samarth's experience is telling, "Because I've done some good numbers, I've had people who wanted to back the product also, but the politics is there, the queer politics and the demonstrated queer politics and the queer agenda in that way has been where it's come and stopped in terms of monetary support and investment."

The challenges extend beyond funding. Shitija from TukuraTukuri, a textile upcycling venture, describes operating in "the margins of the margins." Their work, deliberately slow, non-mass-produced, and resistant to easy categorisation, gets shadowbanned on social media algorithms. "It's very hard to put up things and then wait for the reach to be only 100 or 200 people," they explain, highlighting how digital platforms designed for scale penalise practices that refuse standardisation.

Even established ventures face obstacles that remain invisible in typical business discourse. Prarthana Prasad from Beku, a queer-owned cafe, bakery cum bookstore in JP Nagar, Bengaluru, recounts how a major ticketing platform flagged their queer dating event, stating, "’We don't host events of this nature.’ The dating was not the issue. The fact that we mentioned the word queer and it was a queer-inclusive event was an issue for them." When major platforms still operate with this level of gatekeeping, the economic terrain becomes demonstrably uneven.

Vikas frames it as an assumption problem, "One of the biggest challenges is the assumption that queer-led automatically means niche or fragile. In reality, what we've built proves the opposite. When you create spaces rooted in trust and consistency, people don't just show up, they return, they celebrate life events, they bring their families. That creates durability."

The Niche Question: Coalition Over Competition

The anxiety about being "boxed in" as a queer business reveals a deeper tension about visibility and viability. Yet the entrepreneurs interviewed consistently reframe this as a question of coalition rather than limitation. Samarth articulates this philosophy powerfully, "If someone is going for an anti-pollution rally and if someone else is going for a Free Palestine rally, you will probably find them at a gay rights rally and at an anti-corruption rally also, because that's how coalition works."

This coalition mindset extends to market dynamics. Rather than viewing other queer-coded brands as competition for a limited audience, they see collaborative market-making. "Everyone who is queer coding, everyone, even the straight ones, they are not taking my market share because there isn't any," Samarth notes. "They are helping me create a market in some ways. And we are all helping each other create a market."

Spaces like the Rainbow Literature Festival, Depot 48’s Flea Market, and SOCIAL’s Satrangi Mela serve as crucial infrastructure for this coalition-building. Shitija describes RLF as "the most successful event" because it created room for experimental work, "People will see a thing and they will be ready to go out of their comfort zone and want to see it on their body." These aren't just commercial platforms, they're sites of cultural permission and market creation simultaneously.

Yet the niche question persists institutionally. Shitija's experience with an incubation programme in Northeast India reveals how even well-intentioned support misunderstands the value proposition, "They won't do it because it's a self-fulfilling kind of thing. These people don't have very fixed categories in mind, so they might not be very good in business." The assumption that queer founders lack business acumen becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when support systems demand conformity to predetermined categories.

The Policy Vacuum And What Support Actually Looks Like

Government support for queer entrepreneurs in India is functionally non-existent. Whilst schemes exist for "marginalized genders", primarily targeting women entrepreneurs through Mudra loans and similar programmes, they require rigid categorisation that many queer people find alienating or inaccessible. Swati articulates the bind precisely, "To access those benefits, you have to box yourself into a category, and a lot of queer people don't really feel safe boxing themselves into those categories. And a lot of queer people also don't have the collaterals that are required for these loans or the family supports that are required."

The alienation from natal families, a reality for many queer entrepreneurs, creates structural barriers to accessing even these limited schemes. As Swati notes, "The alienation from native families makes it very hard to get these government benefits."

Vikas proposes concrete alternatives, "Clear, inclusive guidelines for hospitality spaces around gender-neutral restrooms and workplace policies. Easier access to credit and grants for independent restaurants, bars, and live-music venues, especially those doing cultural programming. Recognition of queer-owned venues as cultural infrastructure—spaces that create jobs, tourism, and safe public life."

The entrepreneurs interviewed have largely built their ventures through self-funding, community trust, and what Vikas calls "sheer persistence." Informal networks, friends, chosen family, queer collectives, provide the scaffolding that institutional support fails to offer. These aren't merely stopgaps but demonstrations of what coalition-based economics can achieve when formal structures remain hostile or indifferent.

What emerges from these conversations is not a call for rainbow-washing or superficial inclusion, but for recognition that queer-led businesses operate as cultural infrastructure. They create employment, anchor communities, and model alternative economic practices. 

In a country where queer existence was criminalised until 2018, these ventures represent not just entrepreneurship but an ongoing negotiation with legitimacy itself, one that's reshaping Indian business from the margins inward.