With union minister for commerce and industry Piyush Goyal and minister of state for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar as the guests of honour, ET feted eight startup champions at a gala ceremony in Bengaluru on Saturday.
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“When you are flush with cash, you tend to make mistakes, a slightly tight-fisted environment is always good for your businesses. Some occasional roadblocks will only help our startup ecosystem mature,” said Goyal, capturing the mood of the occasion perfectly.
OfBusiness received the coveted Startup of the Year award 2023, joining a list of illustrious winners of this coveted trophy, including Razorpay, Zomato, Zerodha, Delhivery, Oyo Hotels & Homes, Swiggy, Freshworks, and Ola. With a net profit of Rs 460 crore on revenue of Rs 15,200 crore in fiscal 2023, and a valuation of close to $5 billion, the business-to-business commerce startup was the clear winner.
Besides OfBusiness, startups operating across a variety of sectors from space tech to clean energy were honoured at ETSA 2023. With Best in Campus winner Digantara Research & Technologies, a company building technology to clear up debris in the space, and Top Innovator String Bio, which is converting waste gases into plant and animal nutrition, the spirit with which Indians are building for the future was celebrated at the ceremony.
But startups are not focused only on the ‘high-tech’, they are touching people’s everyday lives, too.
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Sense of optimism
Rashi Narang, who won in the Women Ahead category, started a brand for pets named Heads Up for Tails, which has reached an annual turnover of around Rs 200 crore. FIA Global, the winner in the Social Enterprise category, provides banking services to more than 82 million rural Indians and South Asians.
The ceremony also recognised Jishnu Bhattacharjee, managing director of Nexus Venture Partners, as the winner of the Midas Touch award for his investments and profitable exits in SaaS startups. In the Comeback Kid category, the award was bagged by the founders of ZopSmart, a unanimous choice of the jury for building a successful ecommerce enabler after failing to build an instant delivery startup.
The Bootstrap Champ award went to six-year-old Gameberry Labs, which is building mobile games for the international audience with consistent revenue growth.
If the bottom line is one thing founders need to keep a sharp focus on, regulation is the other factor they must prepare for. Minister of state for electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar spoke about how the government is very clear about keeping the rules of business for startups simple.
The Prime Minister has given a clear instruction to not create roadblocks for startups, rather catalyse innovation, he said at the event.
Also read | Indian SaaS companies can tap domestic public markets too: Nexus’s Jishnu Bhattacharjee
It is not just founders who went with the flow of building lofty valuations without focusing on their bottom lines, even investors got swept away in the valuation frenzy which gripped the tech ecosystem through 2021-2022.
Prashant Prakash of Accel India spoke about how investors were looking more for storytellers in their founders rather than operators of great companies.
“I think it is related to the fear of missing out (during the boom period) and related to how we get carried away at certain times,” Prakash said at a panel discussion on the theme – ‘New Order for Startup Inc: Decoding the Playbook for Sustainable Businesses’.
Harshil Mathur, cofounder and chief executive of Razorpay – the 2022 Startup of the Year winner – said it was his fourth or fifth time attending the dazzling ceremony, and one big change he saw now was that there’s a lot of discussion around revenue, profitability and sustainability.
“While there is so much gloom and doom in the startup world with news around layoffs, down rounds in startups, you look at the mood in this room, it is full of positive energy, which is very reassuring and gives you a sense of optimism,” Mathur said.
Guests at the ceremony also lauded the variety of winners. Nandita Sinha, chief executive of Flipkart-owned fashion portal Myntra, said: “I think it’s always great to see different kinds of startups winning the awards and taking centre stage, something that has inspired me. The one lesson I would like to give upcoming startups is to not focus on the competition but to focus on their customers.”
In addition to celebrating the best of the Indian new economy ecosystem, ET Startup Awards is also about bringing the who’s who of this world together, facilitating dialogues and conversations between various stakeholders.
“I could see almost all the entrepreneurs I know here in one place. The sense of being in one of those places where this happens and also hearing the ministers directly on very important questions makes it a great event all in all,” said Vidit Aatrey, cofounder and CEO of ecommerce marketplace Meesho.
Among all the glittering faces, one person who was getting a lot of attention in the room was Aadit Palicha, cofounder and chief executive of quick-commerce startup Zepto. While obliging for selfies with other founders and startup executives, Palicha had to also speak about building a company at the age of 21 which recently became a unicorn.
“Valuations are vanity metrics, we are aiming to go public in the next 18 to 24 months,” Palicha said at the panel discussion while talking about his latest unicorn round.
The ET Startup Awards are presented by IDFC First Bank, with workspace partner IndiQube, knowledge partner Tracxn, hospitality partner The Leela Palace Bengaluru, telecast partner ET Now and beverage partner Paul John Distillers.