ET Startup Awards 2021: The year belongs to Zomato | Economic Times

Zomato, the food delivery and restaurant discovery company that blazed a new trail with its stellar public listing earlier this year, won top honours at the seventh edition of India’s most prestigious awards for entrepreneurship — The Economic Times Startup Awards.At a virtual meeting that lasted for about two hours on September 24, a high-powered jury led by Infosys cofounder and non-executive chairman Nandan Nilekani, chose winners across nine categories from a shortlist of 44 contenders.The jury, comprising a veritable who’s who in entrepreneurship, finance and corporate leadership from across the globe, chose winners with ambition to break new ground, demonstrate the ability to build large, scalable businesses and possess the perseverance to tide over tough times that are intrinsic to starting up but even more so amid a once-in-a century pandemic.“Zomato has broken the glass between the private and the public universe. These two have been a parallel universe 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.The Gurgaon-based company, with a market cap of Rs 1.07 lakh crore on the BSE as of September 24, joins a list of eminent winners that have previously bagged the award for Startup of the Year such as Ola, Freshworks, Swiggy, Oyo, Delhivery and Zerodha.Apart from being the first high-profile consumer internet unicorn to go public (unicorns are companies valued over $1 billion), Zomato’s successful listing, which came soon after it had weathered the upheaval wrought by Covid-19 also found mention with the jury taking note of the company’s tenacity and persistence. In 2014, Zomato was chosen as the Startup of the Year in this paper’s flagship event — The Economic Times Awards for Corporate Excellence.Notable also was the choice of Sanjeev Bikhchandani, cofounder of Info Edge as the winner of the Midas Touch Award for Best Investor for what the jury described as his exemplary impact on the Indian startup ecosystem first as an entrepreneur and now, as one of the country’s most successful investors with his early bet on Zomato.“He (Bikhchandani) is the Bhishma Pitamaha of the (Indian) startup ecosystem,” said Navi Technologies founder and CEO Sachin Bansal, using a term denoting an elder statesman drawn from the epic Mahabharata.Bansal was part of the eleven-member jury drawn from locations across India, Silicon Valley and Singapore. 86540424The award for the Bootstrap Champ went to Kovai, a SaaS startup based across Coimbatore and London, while the prize for Top Innovator went to Log9 Materials. Ixigo cofounders Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar were chosen as winners of the Comeback Kid category.The startup adjudged as the Best-on-Campus was FamPay, while Lizzie Chapman, the cofounder of ZestMoney, was the winner of the Woman Ahead prize.Genrobotic Innovations bagged top honours in the Social Enterprise category for the use of robots in fostering deep and impactful social change.While Urban Company emerged on top in the newly introduced category for this year — Covid-led Business Transformation.Role ModelsThis year, the decisive votes were also cast for those entrepreneurs exhibiting a long-term outlook with the jury commending those who have stuck to building and executing at their companies for years, specifically because these founders can be role models for those aspiring to start up.The winners in categories like Comeback Kid, Woman Ahead, and even Startup of the Year exemplified this quality, the elite jury said.“We should dedicate this year to startups for showing the way and putting India on the global map. I think it’s just the beginning, may be there will be bumps in the way like everything else but it’s the beginning of a very long journey of success for a lot of our companies,” said GV Ravishankar, MD, Sequoia Capital India, a jury member.Others who also participated in the jury discussions were Deepinder Goyal, cofounder and CEO, Zomato; Gokul Rajaram, product and business leader of US-based DoorDash; Nithin Kamath, founder and CEO of Zerodha; Anu Hariharan, partner at Y Combinator Continuity Fund; Amit Agarwal, global SVP and country head at Amazon India; Satyan Gajwani, vice chairman, Times Internet Ltd; Harsh Jain, cofounder and CEO of Dream11 and Ankiti Bose, cofounder and CEO of Zilingo.Select GroupThe initial pool of candidates for the seventh edition of The Economic Times Startup Awards was created by a select group of around 100 founders, investors and other stakeholders of the country’s startup ecosystem. ET’s editors worked with knowledge partner Tracxn, a research venture to create the final shortlist. This ensures that the ET Startup Awards are a recognition bestowed by, for and of the best among peers.The Economic Times Startup Awards 2021 is presented by IDFC First Bank in partnership with Knowledge Partner Tracxn.