Journal of African Development

India's startup ecosystem has witnessed remarkable growth over the past decade, with over two lakh ventures now recognized by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), of which approximately fifty percent originate from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Despite this numerical significance, the lived experiences of founders operating outside major metropolitan hubs remain largely absent from academic literature, which has disproportionately focused on the ecosystems of Bengaluru, Delhi NCR, and Mumbai. This study addresses that gap through an exploratory qualitative investigation of entrepreneurial experiences in three non-metro cities, Jaipur, Rohtak, and Panipat and situates those experiences in comparative relation to the Delhi NCR startup ecosystem. Seventeen semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with startup founders across the three cities, and the resulting data were analyzed using thematic analysis following the framework of Braun and Clarke (2006). Five overarching themes emerged from the analysis: infrastructure and operational constraints, access to capital and investor networks, talent acquisition and retention challenges, community networks and social capital, and government policy awareness, access, and impact. The findings reveal that non-metro founders navigate a structurally more challenging entrepreneurial environment than their metropolitan counterparts, characterized by infrastructure deficits, geographic distance from investor networks, persistent talent drain toward metro cities, and a pronounced gap between the availability and the actual utilization of government support schemes. Simultaneously, the study surfaces community social capital as a genuine and distinctive asset of smaller city ecosystems, enabling early-stage survival and local market penetration in ways that metropolitan environments, with their greater transactional anonymity, do not easily replicate. The study contributes to entrepreneurial ecosystem theory by demonstrating the need for context-sensitive, place-based frameworks capable of capturing the dynamics of peripheral ecosystems in emerging economies. It further offers actionable insights for policymakers, investors, and ecosystem builders committed to extending India's entrepreneurial ambitions equitably beyond the metropolitan core