India’s 15 best-funded startups (INFOGRAPHIC)

India’s tryst with tech goes back 25 years, when economic liberalization unleashed an array of IT companies like Infosys, Wipro, and TCS which became global entities. But the country also got nicknamed the back office of the world, as this first wave of tech firms focused on providing software services to their big-name clients, mostly in the West. Indian tech talent and efficiency were evident, but to see Indian innovation and entrepreneurship you had to go to Silicon Valley.

This has changed in the last five years, when tech startups started sprouting in India, and gradually attracted the attention of venture capital. This reached a crescendo last year when nearly US$5 billion was invested in Indian startups, including a whopping US$1.7 billion in just one ecommerce site – Flipkart. Apart from western VCs, Japanese investors too took a yen for the tech scene in India, led by SoftBank which pledged to invest US$10 billion in the country.

So where’s the smart money going in India? What are the smart plays being made by the startup community in India? How are they taking advantage of a large population, rising urban living standards, and boom in smartphone and internet usage?

Here’s a look at Techlist data on the 15 highest funded startups in India, all of which can be expected to cross new milestones in 2015.