Winners

9/27/21, 9:05 AM Gmail - ETSA 2021: And the winners are...
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SundaraRajan Margabandhu <primaryinfo@gmail.com>
ETSA 2021: And the winners are...

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ETtech <newsletter@ettech.com> Mon, Sep 27, 2021 at 7:28 AM
Reply-To: newsletter@ettech.com
To: primaryinfo@gmail.com
/ Morning Dispatch
Good morning SundaraRajan,
Over the past week, we revealed the nominees for The
Economic Times Startup Awards 2021
in nine categories,
including Bootstrap Champ, Woman Ahead, and, of course,
Startup of the Year
.

On Friday, our high-powered jury, comprising top Indian and
global business leaders, investors and entrepreneurs, met
virtually to decide which of these deserved to be called the best
of the best.

Today, it's our pleasure to announce the winners
of India's most
prestigious recognition for Indian entrepreneurs.

This big-bang year belongs to Zomato
Zomato cofounder Deepinder Goyal

Zomato, which had a trailblazing IPO earlier this year, won top
honours at the seventh edition of The Economic Times Startup
Awards. Our high-powered jury, led by Infosys cofounder and
non-executive chairman Nandan Nilekani, chose winners
across nine categories from a shortlist of 44 contenders on
Friday.

The winners included companies that aim to break new ground,
demonstrate the ability to build large, scalable businesses, and
have perseverance to tide over tough times -- including a once-
in-a century pandemic.

“Zomato has broken the glass between the private and the public universe. These two
have been parallel universes for a decade. The fact that somebody burst out of the
private universe and had such a spectacular success on the consciousness of the public
markets, that itself is an astonishingly mind-blowing achievement…,” Nilekani said.
With this, the Gurgaon-based company joins a list of eminent
companies that have previously bagged the award: Ola,

Freshworks, Swiggy, Oyo, Delhivery and Zerodha.

Role models: The decisive votes were cast for entrepreneurs
that have shown a long-term outlook. The winners in categories
such as Comeback Kid, Woman Ahead, and even Startup of
the Year exemplified this quality, the jury said.

Select group: A select group of around 100 founders, investors
and other stakeholders of the country’s startup ecosystem
chose the initial pool of candidates for the awards. ET’s editors
then worked with knowledge partner Tracxn to create the final
shortlist, ensuring that the ET Startup Awards
are a recognition
bestowed by, for and on the best among peers.

Startup of the Year: Zomato

Online food delivery and restaurant platform Zomato was voted
as The Economic Times Startup of the Year 2021 by a star-
studded jury, just a few months after it went public, setting an
example for others in the industry.

Zomato's blockbuster listing not only received major
institutional capital but stirred up massive interest among retail
investors too.

But that doesn’t mean the jury’s decision was easy by any
means. Edtech major Byju’s was discussed widely for its
ambition to become a large global player in online education.
But Zomato's IPO, combined with its ability to survive and

thrive in a hyper-competitive industry such as online food
delivery, found favour with the jury.

“By building an amazing business in an extremely competitive
market with incredibly tough unit economics, Zomato is a
business that’s not just a leader in India but is respected
globally," said Gokul Rajaram, product and business leader,
DoorDash.

Deepinder Goyal, cofounder and CEO at Zomato, who did not
participate in the discussions and the voting as he was a jury
member, said, “We didn’t think we would win this, as all the
other nominees are great companies. We look up to some of
them for a number of things. In that light, we are thankful and
humbled for winning the prestigious Startup of the Year Award.
We hope to continue living up to the honour in the years to
come.”

Midas Touch for best investor: Sanjeev
Bikhchandani

This year’s Midas Touch award for the best investor went to
Sanjeev Bikhchandani, a veteran of the Indian internet industry.
The Info Edge cofounder was almost the unanimous choice of
the jury for his contribution to Zomato’s success as its very first
investor back in 2010.

His first cheque for Zomato was for Rs 4.7 crore in 2010. Today
Info Edge’s 15.23% stake in the company is worth Rs 16,327
crore (at Friday’s closing price of Rs 136.65 per share on the
BSE).

“Sanjeev has been around since the first tech boom and has

been an inspiration to all of us. Now he’s inspiring us as an
investor as well. His knack for picking companies to invest in,
helping them and seeing them through the entire journey till
they go public is what is exemplary,” said jury member Sachin
Bansal, cofounder of Flipkart and founder and CEO of Navi
Technologies.

Bikhchandani said that while it was a great honour to be
adjudged the winner, the credit goes to the investment team of
Info Edge and mostly to Zomato. “Though I’m the face of Info
Edge, the truth is it’s the investment team, the other directors
that have enabled us to stay on as investors… It’s a joint effort
and most of the credit goes to the Zomato team,” he said.

Comeback Kid: Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish
Kumar, cofounders, Ixigo

The jury was inspired by Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar’s
decision to not change course in the face of several
adversities, an attribute they said was the hallmark of a winner.

In the end, it was the grit and resilience of the founders of the
15-year-old travel booking website -- which will go public soon -
- that swung it for them.

The two IIT Kanpur alumni were chosen after one of the
longest discussions during the ETSA jury meeting. After the
first round of voting, it was between the Ixigo founders and
Manish Taneja of Purplle. Bajpai and Kumar won because, as
the jury members highlighted, Ixigo not only survived the

Covid-19 pandemic, it is slated to launch a Rs 1,600-crore
(about $215 million) IPO soon.

“Ixigo has seen many cycles of not being the leader, being
written off, having faced the Covid-19 disruption, but they
persevered and are taking the company all the way to an IPO.
That is impressive,” said jury member Amit Agarwal, global
SVP and country head at Amazon India.

“It has been a roller coaster ride full of twists and turns. Despite
being one of the least capitalised players in a hyper-
competitive category, we never shied away from working on
game changing product ideas. At many points in our journey,
we ran out of money, but we never ran out of ideas to grow
faster and take a bigger bet on ourselves,” Kumar said.

Woman Ahead: Lizzie Chapman

In the end, it all came down to Lizzie Chapman’s perseverance
as she pipped Sugar Cosmetics chief executive Vineeta Singh
to emerge as the winner in the Woman Ahead category.

Chapman’s journey in financial services goes back to 2011
when she was the India head of UK-based BNPL player
Wonga. She founded ZestMoney in 2015 with former
colleagues from Wonga, to make digital goods and services
accessible to the masses. The company recently raised $50
million in its Series C funding round from global BNPL provider
Zip Co Ltd.

“ZestMoney has built something unique which I personally

haven't seen anywhere else. Also, it’s scaled not just online,
but also offline in partnership with point-of-sale. By essentially
competing and winning in this competitive category, Chapman
and ZestMoney deserve to get the award,” said jury member
Gokul Rajaram, the product and business leader at US-based
food delivery platform DoorDash.

“Almost 10 years ago, we saw that Indian consumers would
love a product that had the lowest costs and was the easiest to
use. We were probably a tiny bit too early, but the observations
we had then -- that BNPL (buy now, pay later) was going to be
much-needed in the Indian ecosystem -- has finally become
very obvious,” Chapman said.

Top Innovator: Log 9 Materials

Log 9 Materials’ future potential to massively disrupt two
sectors eventually led the jury members of ETSA to pick it as
the winner in the Top Innovator category.

The race began with two favourites -- Qure.ai, a healthcare
startup which uses artificial intelligence to interpret radiology
images, and Log 9 Materials, which is developing battery and
fuel cell technologies.

Founded in 2015, Log 9 Materials started off as a material
sciences company with expertise in manufacturing graphene
and carbon nanomaterials, but pivoted to productise its own

research and zeroed in on developing lithium-ion battery and
aluminium fuel-cell technologies.

Best on Campus: FamPay
Two very different companies fought a close battle for the top
honours in the Best on Campus category at the ETSA 2021.

The jury had to weigh the pros and cons carefully to decide
between Pixxel, a startup building a constellation of earth
imaging satellites, and FamPay, a provider of payments and

financial services to teenagers.

After an animated discussion, the jury members picked
FamPay as the top startup to emerge from a college campus in
India.

FamPay’s product has gained traction during the Covid-19
pandemic as it enables teenagers to own a quasi-digital
banking account where parents can deposit pocket money and
other allowances.

Social Enterprise: Genrobotic
Innovations

Using cutting-edge technology to overcome some of the most
deep-rooted social issues, such as manual scavenging, helped
Genrobotic Innovations emerge as the winner in the crucial
Social Enterprise category.

While rural fintech and lending startup Jai Kisan was neck-and-
neck with Genrobotic after the first round of voting, the
Thiruvananthapuram-based startup pulled ahead as the jury
discussed the novelty of the idea to use robots to replace
manual scavenging.

“Genrobotic is bringing together technology, purpose and
profitability, which is rare and extremely valuable,” said Ankiti
Bose, cofounder and CEO of B2B ecommerce platform Zilingo,
who was part of the jury.

Bootstrap Champ: Kovai.co

Kovai.co's determination to build world-class software products
out of a Tier-II city such as Coimbatore, rather than Bengaluru
or Chennai, sealed the deal for the members of the jury.

The startup, which went head-to-head with fellow Chennai-born
SaaS company Cardinality.ai, eventually ended up on the top
of the jury’s list for Bootstrap Champ, for its financial heft and
ability to inspire entrepreneurs to build global businesses from
smaller cities and towns.

“It’s very hard to build a bootstrapped company at scale," said
Anu Hariharan, a jury member and partner at Y Combinator
Continuity Fund. "They’ve done it in a very interesting format

which I’ve never seen before — of having a presence in both
London and Coimbatore, but largely having their engineering
team in Coimbatore which helps them on the cost and R&D."

Covid-led Business Transformation:
Urban Company
The founders of Urban Company -- Abhiraj Singh Bhal, Raghav
Chandra and Varun Khaitan -- were able to significantly grow a
high-touch services business amid a raging pandemic, even as
most offline counterparts were severely impacted.

The ETSA jury highlighted this aspect as the key quality of the
Gurugram-based firm formerly known as UrbanClap.

“They completely transformed their business during Covid-19,
using various safety protocols and staff vaccinations to turn a
terrible pandemic into a business opportunity. They launched
and scaled new categories such as Men’s Salon. Eventually,
Urban Company personnel were one of the few 'outside'
people entering our homes before anybody else,” said Zomato
cofounder Deepinder Goyal, one of the jury members.

ETSA Alumni: Where are they now?
The previous winners of the ET Startup Awards (ETSA) have
stood out in a crowded startup ecosystem and gone on to
become successful businesses. We look at a few of them from
previous editions of the awards.

Girish Mathrubootham & Shan Krishnasamy

Freshworks | Startup of the Year (2016)

Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham

Last week, Freshworks (previously Freshdesk) became the first
Indian SaaS startup to list on the Nasdaq, raising over $1
billion in its IPO at a valuation of over $10 billion.

Falguni Nayar

Nykaa | Woman Ahead (2017)

Nykaa founder and CEO Falguni Nayar

Omni-channel beauty and personal care retailer Nykaa is
planning to raise as much as Rs 4,000 crore at a valuation of
over $4 billion in an IPO scheduled for later this year.

Srinath Ravichandran & Moin SPM

Agnikul Cosmos | Top Innovator (2020)

Srinath Ravichandran (right) and Moin SPM, cofounders,
AgniKul

Earlier this month, space technology startup Agnikul signed an
MoU with the Department of Space for the development and
testing of its space launch vehicles.

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