ET Startup Awards 2022: All the details

By Kevin Colleran On Oct 29, 2022

The winners of the 2022 edition of the Economic Times Startup Awards, which recognise and celebrate excellence in the Indian startup ecosystem, have been decided. ETSA’s high-powered jury virtually met on Friday and picked the winners across nine categories. In the run-up to the awards presentation, we bring you a recap of all the nominees, in this edition of Unwrapped.

Led by Salil Parekh, chief executive and managing director of Infosys, the jury met virtually to choose the winners, at a time when the global startup and technology ecosystem is being roiled by economic and geopolitical uncertainty.

Read more about the high-powered 10-member jury here

The biggest and the most important component for the jury is a 200-page dossier we prepared. This handbook, packed with information which stays confidential with the jury, goes through multiple checks and rechecks before it is finalised.

How we pick the ETSA nominees: ET reached out to over 200 of the country’s top entrepreneurs, investors, industry groups and other stakeholders to compile a list of the brightest entrepreneurial talent. This was then distilled by the publication’s editorial team, which worked with knowledge partner Tracxn to arrive at the final list. The jury finally picked the winners after long deliberations followed by voting.

Here’s a look at the nine award categories and the nominees:

Social Enterprise: Chakr Innovation, Digivriddhi Technologies, Gramcover Insurance Brokers, Stellapps Technologies, Banyan Nation

Best on Campus: ClaimBuddy, Solinas Integrity, Sanfe, Bhanzu, Vecros

Woman Ahead: Meghana Narayan and Shauravi Malik (Slurrp Farm), Supriya Paul (Josh Talks), Smita Deorah (Lead School), Saroja Yeramilli (Melorra), Suhasini Sampath and Anindita Sampath (Yoga Bar)

Midas Touch: Vikram Vaidyanathan (Matrix Partners India), Mohit Bhatnagar (Sequoia Capital India), Shekhar Kirani (Accel India), Suvir Sujan (Nexus Venture Partners), Akshay Tanna (TPG Growth)

Startup of the Year: Browserstack, Razorpay, OfBusiness, Lenskart, Dream Sports

CEO of the Year: Kalyan Krishnamurthy (Flipkart), Hari Menon (BigBasket), Sahil Barua (Delhivery), Falguni Nayar (Nykaa), Amrish Rau (Pine Labs)

The winners will be declared on Monday. Watch this space to know more!

Let’s take a look at other big developments of the week.

Elon Musk’s tumultuous journey to acquire Twitter ends

Tesla chief Elon Musk’s tumultuous, $44-billion bid to buy Twitter concluded after months of uncertainty and speculation. Musk tweeted “the bird is freed” on Thursday, chanelling the firm’s logo, shortly after he said he had made the purchase “to help humanity, whom I love”.

Soon after, Musk sacked chief executive Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde.

ETtech Explainer: How Elon Musk-Twitter saga unfolded amid top-level firing, leaked chats and more

We spoke to experts, who said Musk’s “free-speech absolutist” stance could intensify clashes between Twitter and the Indian government, which has been putting pressure on social media firms to follow local regulations. Musk’s statement to advertisers, however, seemed to have toned down the rhetoric, signalling some moderation in how he was looking at the platform, the experts added.

A day after closing the Twitter deal, Elon Musk on Friday announced that the social media platform will form a content moderation council with “widely diverse viewpoints”.

Startups turn to convertible notes

Amid the ongoing funding drought, startups are moving towards alternative ways to raise funds, and convertible notes have become the new favourite. This week, D2C audio products and wearables brand Boat closed a $60-million (about Rs 500 crore) financing arrangement through convertible preferred stocks notes with existing investor Warburg Pincus and new investor Malabar Investments.

ETtech Deals Digest: With funding hard to come by, startups look at convertible notes

B2B ecommerce startup Udaan also raised $120 million through convertible notes and debt from existing shareholders and bondholders. “With this round, the total funds raised by Udaan through convertible notes and debt in the last four quarters has crossed $350 million, making it one of the largest structured instrument fund raises in the country,” its chief financial officer, Aditya Pande, said in an internal email to employees.

Also read | Late-stage startups tap alternative funding route amid softening valuations

Google plans to challenge CCI order

Google is planning to move court in a bid to block a ruling by antitrust watchdog Competition Commission of India, which directed the tech giant to change its approach to its Android operating system. Google is concerned that following the CCI directions will restrict how it promotes the platform, sources told Reuters.

The Alphabet Inc unit has been fined $275 million in two antitrust decisions since last week — one for its policy of charging in-app commissions and another for abusing its position in the market for the Android operating system.

Click here to read the latest development

WhatsApp outage aftermath

Messaging platform WhatsApp submitted a report to the IT ministry over the service outage that occurred on Tuesday after the ministry asked the Meta-owned messaging platform to explain why there was a service disruption.

WhatsApp suffered a nearly two-hour-long outage, with users complaining about not being able to send or receive text and video messages. “The brief outage was a result of a technical error on our part and has now been resolved,” a Meta company spokesperson had said.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had asked Meta if the disruption was due to an internal glitch or a cyberattack.

The IT ministry also asked WhatsApp to coordinate with the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) to ascertain whether there was any untoward cyber incident with regard to the company’s servers at the time of the outage.

Ecommerce results

E-commerce company Flipkart’s marketplace arm, Flipkart Internet, posted a 33% surge in operating revenue in fiscal 2022, but its loss for the year widened one-and-a-half times as it spent more on delivering orders as well on advertisements and promotions.

The Indian unit of Walmart posted a net loss of Rs 4,361 crore on operating revenue of Rs 10,476 crore in the year ended March 31, 2022, regulatory filings sourced from business intelligence platform Tofler showed.

Meanwhile, Flipkart-owned fashion e-tailer Myntra reported a 45% jump in revenue from operations to Rs 3,501 crore. However, its net loss widened 40% to Rs 597 crore in FY22, regulatory filings accessed by business intelligence platform Tofler showed.

Myntra’s revenue from marketplace services increased 18% to Rs 1,610 from Rs 1,359 crore last year. The company’s income from logistics services almost doubled to Rs 1,498 crore over FY21, while revenue from advertisements shot up 76% to Rs 344 crore.

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