Gajwani reminisced about the 2016 edition of the awards, when—like this year—the jury was chaired by Infosys cofounder and chairman Nandan Nilekani.
“That year, we gave the Best on Campus award to two young entrepreneurs who had just made a prototype of a product at the incubation centre of IIT Madras. When they came on stage, the CEO said: ‘We need to get our first product out, and the day we meet our first happy customer, then we will truly justify something like this.” That CEO was Tarun Mehta of Ather Energy, whose scooters are now ubiquitous on India’s roads,” Gajwani recalled.
If Ather’s ride from campus to IPO filing happened in just eight years, the Bootstrap Champ winner of 2016—Zerodha—then a small fintech, has just posted revenue of Rs 8,300 crore and a profit of Rs 4,700 crore. Meanwhile, the 2016 Startup of the Year—Freshworks—listed on Nasdaq, continues to thrive as one of the largest SaaS companies to come out of India, said Gajwani.
“These are the stories from just one year, 2016. There’s immense pride and joy in having had the privilege to witness the incredible journey for a decade now,” Gajwani said.
“It’s all of you gathered here today who help mentor and invest in each other and help build great companies together,” he added. “It’s this spirit of entrepreneurship that this city exemplifies. In bringing attention and recognition to this ecosystem, I think that the ET Startup Awards has played a small role in building the cycle of paying it forward.”
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