Revised 15 September 2026 · v2.0.0 · what changed

Consumer-tech IPOs get the headlines — Zepto's Updated DRHP landed in June 2026, OYO's followed in June, and names like FirstCry, boAt, Mamaearth and PharmEasy are the ones people actually remember. But across every SEBI public-issue filing since August 2019, "Consumer Internet & New-age Tech" is the sixth-largest filer category, not the first. The single largest is Industrials, Engineering & Auto — forgings, auto components, precision parts, machine tools, tractors — a sector that gets essentially none of the coverage and 14% of the filings. This is a look at who is actually filing to go public in India, not who gets written about.

The Filing Wave, Year by Year

With four months still to go, 2026 has already overtaken 2023's 97 to become the new full-year record. The bigger story in the run of years is how fast filing volume went from essentially nothing (1 filing in 2019) to a sustained 80–100 a year by 2023 onward, with 2024's dip to 80 the only year-on-year decline in the whole run — and 2026 is not just continuing that plateau, it is breaking through it.

It's Engineering and Auto, Not Tech or Finance

IT, Software & Tech Services overtook Retail, Fashion, Jewellery & Packaging for second place in this update — Jio Platforms' DRHP alone is a large, singular addition, alongside a run of BPM/customer-experience and IT-services filers. Metals, Mining & Building Materials climbed from seventh to fifth on a run of steel filings (Avtar Steel, Jay Jagdamba, M P Steel, ESWARI Global Metal, German Green Steel and Power) — a cluster, not a coincidence.

Underneath even these sector labels, the filer base is more fragmented than any top-line number suggests: at least 283 distinct sub-segments across the 391 companies (a floor from this post's original 349-company snapshot, not recomputed in full for the extension), and the overwhelming majority of those sub-segments contain exactly one company. Real multi-company clusters — more than a handful of businesses filing in the same narrow niche — were the exception in the original snapshot: jewellery (7 companies, now at least 8 with Arjun Jewellers' addition), small finance banks (7), residential real estate (7), IT services (6), wires & cables (5), microfinance (5), and hotels (4). Everything else on the sub-segment list, from "Cryogenic Tanks" to "Digital Maps (MapmyIndia)" to "Fish Protein," is a single company filing on its own, not part of a sector rush.

What's Landed Since This Post First Ran

Four names from the June–August window are worth calling out on their own. The National Stock Exchange of India — the exchange itself, not a company merely listed on it — filed its own DRHP on 18 June 2026, ending years of will-it-won't-it speculation about India's largest bourse going public. Zetwerk, the manufacturing-platform unicorn, filed an Updated DRHP on 13 August 2026 targeting roughly ₹2,600 crore. Encube Ethicals, a specialty-pharma CDMO serving 50 countries, filed a ₹3,000 crore pure offer-for-sale DRHP on 1 August 2026 — no fresh capital raised, entirely an exit for existing shareholders. And Jio Platforms filed on 19 June 2026, the single largest name to newly appear in this dataset.

The Consumer-Internet Names You'd Actually Recognize

The 26 companies in Consumer Internet & New-age Tech are almost all household names precisely because there are few enough of them that each one stands out: FirstCry, boAt, Mamaearth, OYO, PharmEasy, ixigo, Policybazaar, MapmyIndia, Snapdeal's Unicommerce, logistics platform BlackBuck, and Zepto among them. That visibility is part of why this sector's actual 7.4% share of filers reads as surprising — it is a small, concentrated group that happens to be the most written-about one, not the largest.

Filing a DRHP Is Not the Same as Going Public

Of the 391 companies with at least one filing, 252 (64%) have never gone past their initial DRHP — no amendment, no update, nothing since. Another 96 (25%) have filed an Addendum, and 21 (5%) a Corrigendum, both signs SEBI has come back with observations the company is working through. 22 companies (6%) have reached an Updated DRHP, the filing that typically comes right before an issue actually opens — Zetwerk among the newest arrivals there.

The Net Read

India's SEBI filing pipeline is not a story about a handful of hot sectors racing to list. It is a large, fragmented base of mostly single-company niches, growing so fast that 2026 broke the previous full-year filing record with four months still on the clock, where the biggest sector by headcount is unglamorous industrial manufacturing rather than the consumer-tech names that dominate coverage — and where most companies on file are still several regulatory steps and a hard 12-month clock away from actually ringing a bell.

Sources: compiled from SEBI's own public-issue filings register (sebi.gov.in/filings/public-issues), covering DRHP, Updated DRHP, Addendum and Corrigendum filings from August 2019 through 27 August 2026. The August 2019–June 2026 base (437 filings, 349 companies) and the June–August 2026 extension (51 further filings, 42 newly-appearing companies) come from two independently-maintained captures of the same SEBI register — the original export, and a second capture already running inside this ecosystem's own herrrickshaw/digital-twin-for-ipa project via a direct SEBI AJAX endpoint (sebiweb/ajax/home/getnewslistinfo.jsp) rather than the page's visible HTML. The two don't reconcile filing-for-filing (417 vs 437 raw rows over their full respective windows), so this update adds only the confirmed-new companies and filings from the second capture's post-cutoff window, not a full merge of both histories; sector classification for the 42 new companies was done the same way as the original 349, researched individually rather than inferred from company name alone. On SEBI observation-letter validity under ICDR Regulation 44 and the 2026 extension: Share.Market and Sapient Services. Company examples (Zepto, FirstCry, boAt, Mamaearth, OYO, PharmEasy, ixigo, Policybazaar, MapmyIndia, Unicommerce, BlackBuck, NSE, Jio Platforms, Zetwerk, Encube Ethicals) per the same filings register; sector and sub-segment groupings are this analysis's own classification, not a SEBI-assigned taxonomy.

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.