As Indian startups go public, the industry has come of age.

The jury meeting of this year’s ET Startup Awards was held in the backdrop of two record-breaking IPOs by Indian startups-
zomato And
freshworks– which the esteemed panel termed as a success moment not only for these companies, but for the Indian startup ecosystem as a whole.

The 11-member jury, which plugged in for the nearly two-hour-long meeting from across India, Silicon Valley and Singapore, graciously read out a 120-page dossier prepared by the ET editorial team.

Precisely chaired by Infosys cofounder and non-executive chairman Nandan Nilekani, who kept the discussion sharp and focused, involving all the jury members to share their views, the meeting ended in record time.

The shortlist of five candidates in each category was then sorted into two or three companies after a preliminary vote, after which jurors debated the merits of each to reach a final consensus through secret ballot. Most categories took two rounds of voting and lengthy debate to reach the winner.

Setting the stage for the discussion, Nilekani said, “This year has shown that, in all public offerings – Zomato in India, Freshworks in the US – these events will lead to capital recycling. Limited partners or sponsors in the fund have always said that Where is my liquidity? Now these IPOs will give back liquidity to LPs which in turn will infuse more money…”

There were lengthy discussions in categories like ‘Comeback Kid’, ‘Woman Ahead’ and ‘Startup of the Year’ before the jury members chose the winners based on the second round of voting.

jury member Gokul Rajaram DoorDash said the jury process was very efficient and flexible. “Thanks to our president Nandan Nilekani, who took things forward but not at the cost of discussion and debate.”

Rajaram also said that since the voting was anonymous, jurors could speak their mind after the discussion without being influenced by others. “The two-stage voting process was fair compared to the traditional straight-up vote,” he said.

what did they say

Nandan Nilekani, Co-Founder, Infosys

For the first time this year, I feel that Indian startups are leading the needle, and will continue to do so in the future as they play an increasingly strategic and important role in the post-pandemic recovery.

GV Ravishankar, MD, Sequoia Capital India

The choice of winners represents the collective will of the jury to recognize startups that have broken boundaries in terms of growth, innovation and setting new milestones that will encourage young startups to aspire to bigger and higher goals .

Gokul Rajaram, Product and Business Leader, Doordarshan

ET has done a great job of collating and collating information on startup nominees across categories. It was about as broad as a venture capitalist memoir on a company, except much more concise and crisp. I really felt like I knew startups enough to consider them. This was very different from the other juries I’ve been in, where you just get a website and a few lines on each company to check out.

Satyan Gajwani, Vice Chairman, Times Internet

It is worth mentioning that last year, Startup of the Year was the most private company- Zerodha- and this year it is the most famous publicly traded startup that we have chosen.

Sachin Bansal, Founder and CEO, Navi Technologies

Over the years, I have seen the ET Startup Awards, a tremendous improvement in the quality of entrepreneurs and companies. Some of the nominees are early stage startups solving for sweeping social changes and are as quickly profitable as the nominees in the social enterprise category this year.

Deepinder Goyal, Co-Founder and CEO, Zomato

One of the cool things I noticed among the nominees today was the wide array of startups. 10 years ago, it was Web 2.0 like ours, or commerce like Flipkart, now there’s a lot of deep technology, and the founders are trying to do a lot. This will really shape the 10 years ahead.

Anu Hariharan, Partner, YC Continuity Fund

I see a drastic change in the ambition of Indian founders over the past decade. We have grown our alumni from India from 30 to over 100 companies in the last two to three years. And I would say that every founder of the batch is not just manufacturing for India, it is different from even 10 years ago.

Amit Agarwal, Global SVP and Country Head, Amazon India

I am attracted by the boldness of ideas among the nominees. This year, we had startups vying for new types of batteries to be used in robotics for cleaning sewage. It’s incredibly focused on only real customer problems, thinking deeply about the business is just an idea.

Harsh Jain, Co-Founder & CEO, Dream Sports

The depth and breadth in each category stood out for me, analyzing B2C, B2B and SaaS Indian businesses and looking at Unicorns and Soonicorns led by women; All this culminates to show that the Indian startup ecosystem has indeed come of age.

I was personally inspired by the Top Innovator category, which shows how Indian VCs are putting money into pre-revenue ideas, from healthcare AI to blockchain, aerospace, EV battery technology and imaging for autonomous vehicles.

Nitin Kamath, Founder & CEO, Zerodha

We have international quality startups coming up from India, and The Economic Times Startup Awards have perfectly captured this growing ecosystem through their various award categories. I learned a lot, and it was quite interesting to hear the different perspectives of the jury members about all the startups nominated.

Ankiti Bose, Cofounder and CEO, Zilingo

Having categories specifically to honor those who navigated the pandemic well and have female founders is exceptional, something the ecosystem really needs today.