A high-level jury headed by Information systems Co-Founder and President Nandan Nilekani chose the Gurgaon-based company as the Startup of the year at a meeting in Bengaluru on Wednesday. The award recognised Lenscart Business CardThe jury praised the company’s success in creating a large-scale, fast-growing, omnichannel retailer while creating an entirely new category. The 10-member jury chose eight winners from a shortlist of 41 candidates after deliberating for more than two and a half hours.
Founded by Peyush Bansal, Amit Chaudhary, Ramneek Khurana and Neha Bansal in 2010, Lenskart joins a list of eminent winners who have already bagged the top award. They include ZomatoZerodha, Razorpay, OfBusiness, Delhivery, Oyo Hotels & Homes, Swiggy, Freshworks and Ola. Three of them, Zomato, Delhivery and Freshworks—are now publicly traded companies, highlighting the strength of the companies that have bagged the coveted award since their inception in 2015. Ola spun off Ola Electric as a separate entity and went public a month ago. Ola Electric was also one of six nominees in the Startup of the Year category.
“The main theme of ETSA is that the so-called startup world is maturing,” Nilekani said after the jury meeting. “We learned a lot because there are a lot of these companies we may not have heard of, some technological innovations we haven’t seen and even the quality of the entrepreneurs… Overall, it was a good learning experience for us.”
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Mukul Arora, Co-Managing Partner at Elevation Capital, He was chosen as the winner of the coveted Midas Touch Award The jury chose Arora for the variety of his investments, which range from sectors such as food delivery and e-commerce to used car sales and education technology. His investments include Meesho and Swiggy.
Strong revenue growth and profitability, along with plans to go public in the future, emerged as the key theme connecting the jury meeting. “I think the process was very well laid out and we asked everyone to nominate two candidates and sit down to discuss further. Those who know the companies well made good arguments and then we met to decide who the finalists were,” Nilekani said.
The award for The Bootstrap champion was Boult—which sells headphones and smartwatches—for not having to access external financing in a capital-intensive category and still scaling the business to be among the best. The jury highlighted its ability to record consistent revenue and profit growth in a highly competitive sector while being self-funded.
The award for The Best Innovator award went to Bengaluru-based BrainSight AIwhich is developing tools for neurosurgeons and psychiatrists to detect mental health symptoms faster and better, recognising its ability to tap into such a broad sector with growing importance for mental health awareness.
Geetansh Bamania—founder of furniture and electronics rental startup Rentomojo— was chosen as the winner in the Comeback Kid category while ClaimBuddy was considered the best on campus.
Hardika Shah, founder of Kinara Capital—a non-banking financial company (NBFC) that provides loans to small businesses with a special focus on women business owners—was the winner in the Women Ahead category. Haqdarshak, which helps people access government social security services, Won in the Social Enterprise category.
The ten-member jury, made up of top entrepreneurs, investors and corporate leaders from around the world, selected the winners after several rounds of debate followed by a secret ballot. Several of the competitions proved to be very intense.
Joining Nilekani at the historic event were Mithun Sacheti, Founder, CaratLane; Nyrika Holkar, CEO, Godrej & Boyce; Ritesh Arora, Co-Founder and CEO, Browserstack; Albinder Dhindsa, CEO, Blinkit; Sumer Juneja, Managing Partner and Head, India and EMEA, SoftBank; Nikhil Kamath, Co-Founder, Zerodha; Nandita Sinha, CEO, Myntra; Prativa Mohapatra, Managing Director, Adobe India; and cricketer Shubman Gill.
“It is amazing to see that companies have become so big and of such scale and are now starting to make an impact on society and that is great news,” Nilekani added. The initial set of candidates for the 10th edition of The Economic Times Startup Awards was curated by a select group of around 200 founders, investors and other stakeholders from the startup ecosystem in the country. ET’s editorial team worked with knowledge partner Tracxn, a research platform, to come up with the final list.
The Economic Times Startup Awards 2024 are presented by First IDFC Bank in partnership with Tracxn.
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