ET Startup Awards 2025 | Woman Ahead: Diving deep with AI for prize

The hotly contested Woman Ahead category was a jury favourite this year, as the shortlist showcased the quality and calibre of women leading across diverse sectors. In a close race between supply chain financier Progcap’s Pallavi Shrivastava and Atlan’s Prukalpa Sankar, the jury noted the latter’s rare position as a woman founder building in deep tech, ultimately awarding her the honour.

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Fellow nominees included founders from fintech, consumer brands, B2B wholesale and the gig economy.

Also Read: ET Startup Awards 2025 | Urban Company brings it home, bags top honours

“The Woman Ahead category was outstanding… It was hard to pick just one. Each nominee has built amazing businesses. I wanted to vote for three, four, even five of them,” said juror Harshil Mathur, cofounder and CEO of Razorpay.

An engineer from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Sankar discovered her passion for data during an internship at Goldman Sachs. In 2013, she channelled that passion to join hands with Varun Banka, also from NTU, to launch SocialCops, the predecessor to Atlan.

A two-time winner now, Sankar and Banka, previously won the Social Enterprise category at the ET Startup Award in 2019 for Social Cops. The startup aimed to solve critical problems through data as it worked on projects to help in better governance.

A turning point for Sankar came in 2018, when the sudden exit of an analyst exposed the fragility of knowledge management, inspiring the first version of Atlan, launched publicly in 2020.

Backed by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India), Insight Partners, Salesforce Ventures, GIC and Meritech, Atlan has raised $206 million and was valued at $750 million when it raised funds last year.

It now enables large enterprises to collaborate on AI and data projects, with clients such as Autodesk, Nasdaq, FOX, HubSpot and News Corp.

“When I started my entrepreneurial journey, there were very few visible role models of women building global, deep-tech companies from India. To see this changing and to now be recognised among the incredible women leaders who are shaping the future is both humbling and inspiring,” Sankar told ET after winning the award.

“Our next milestones are focused on helping enterprises around the world to make data and AI work in production, moving from experimentation to impact. This means doubling down on our deep-tech innovation, scaling globally, and continuing to attract ambitious, world-class talent who want to build something consequential in the AI-native era.”

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Other contenders

Pallavi Shrivastava

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Progcap was founded with a vision to find new models to fund small and medium enterprises (SMEs). It was founded out of Shrivastava’s experience of working at the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the World Bank, and understanding deep-rooted inequalities in financial access.

Romita Mazumdar

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Foxtale was born out of Mazumdar’s passion for skincare and her keen observation of market gaps. Identifying the need for high-efficacy products, she set out to create a brand that prioritised both quality and affordability.

Shruti

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With ApnaKlub, Shruti aims to help kirana stores augment their incomes by providing them with fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) at competitive prices and efficient delivery services.

Aditi Murarka

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With Nestasia, Aditi is building what she calls the high street of home decor, focussed on design-driven, quality alternatives to premium global brands and unorganised, low-quality players.

Anjali Sardana

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A biology graduate, 23-year-old Anjali Sardana was struck by a mismatch she noticed while visiting India: groceries could arrive in under 10 minutes, yet finding reliable help to clean up still meant asking neighbours or guards and often settling for sub-par service. That frustration, coupled with her interest in labour market inefficiencies, inspired Pronto, a cleaning services startup competing with players like Urban Company and Snabbit.