Journal of African Development

This paper involves an in-depth empirical investigation of IT expenditure behaviour, technological adoption, and expansion patterns of 590 Indian startups in 22 states and 33 industry categories. Based on multi-dimensional data set including IT spending, number of active technology stacks, patent portfolio, investor portfolio, and venture capitalization patterns, the study uses descriptive statistics, Spearman rank-order correlation, and one-way ANOVA to identify structural patterns in digital investment. The main results show that IT spend is highly right-skewed (mean: USD 3.51 million; median: USD 430,502), with a very high heterogeneity among the sectors: Hardware (mean: USD 22.06 million) and Clothing & Apparel (USD 15.60 million) have become the most IT-heavy sectors, yet Commerce and Shopping has a relatively low average, although it occupies 37.3% of the sample. Maharashtra, Delhi, and Karnataka constitute 44.2 percent of all startups, with Haryana registering the most avenues on IT expenditure per firm (USD 7.21 million), on average. Active technology count ( rho = 0.186, p < 0.001) and total active products (rho = 0.248, p < 0.001) are statistically significantly positively correlated with IT spend, but the number of investors is moderately positively correlated ( rho = 0.277, p < 0.05). The article is also part of the growing research on the issue of startup resource allocation in emerging markets and has practical implications to policymakers, venture capitalists, and the organizers of startup ecosystems