STARTUP SPECIAL............ ET AWARDS Ola Rides Home With Top Startup Honour

STARTUP SPECIAL ET AWARDS Ola Rides Home With Top Startup Honour





India's largest cab aggregator Ola has driven away with the highest honour, winning the Startup of the Year award at the jury meeting of the first Jio Economic Times Startup Awards which picked eight individuals and companies to be awarded the white-hot sector's top honours. The jury led by SoftBank Corp President Nikesh Arora and comprising the country's best-known entrepreneurs and investors chose the winners of India's most prestigious startup awards at a meeting in Delhi last Saturday.

Joining Ola on the podi um are Vani Kola of Kalaari Capital -who won the Midas Touch Award for Best Investor, Anu Acharya of MapMyGenome -who won in the Women Ahead category, Jaydeep Barman of Faasos in the Comeback Kid category, Forus Health for the top Social Enterprise, BrowserStack for the best Bootstrap Champ, Purple Squirrel Eduventures in the Best on Campus category and GreyOrange Robotics for being the Top Innovator.

“The central theme behind the decisionmaking was to identify companies with true potential,“ said Arora, who presided over a three-hour-long meeting of seven jurors who picked the winners.

Besides Arora, the jury included Kunal Bahl of Snapdeal; Rohan Murty of Catamaran Ventures; Rishad Premji of Wipro; Meena Ganesh of GrowthStory; Sharad Sharma of software products think tank iSPIRT and VG Siddhartha of Cafe Coffee Day. In a meeting that saw intense, yet al ways cordial, debate, the jury examined and debated five shortlisted candidates in each category, which had been winnowed from thousands of applications by ET and its knowledge partners Zinnov and iSPIRT. Zinnov curated the shortlist for seven categories while iSPIRT curated the Bootstrap Champ category.

Ola along with healthcare technology company Practo and Hector Beverages were thrown into mix by the jury which on its own decided to widen the consideration set of companies for the top award to even include firms that hadn't applied. The jury was unanimous that whichever company was chosen as the Startup of the Year must have the potential to grow into one of India's top corporations in the next few years. The year 2015-16, it said, should have been the defining year for the company's growth.

“We wanted to make sure that the company that we select is something that truly has a high potential, and five years later when you look back, it should be something that stood the test of time,“ said Ganesh, a serial entrepreneur, investor and also the CEO of home healthcare venture Portea.

The Jio Economic Times Startup Awards, which received an unprecedented 3,701 qualified applications from companies and entre preneurs keen to receive the sector's highest accolades, are an affirmation of ET's continuing commitment to the Indian Dream. ET has led the way on startup coverage in India, shining the light on the new stars of Indian industry and the blue-chip corporations of tomorrow. The flagbearer of entrepreneurship coverage in India, ET recognises that starting up is about chasing a dream, and the collateral benefits could change India and, with it, the world.

Ola narrowly beat Practo to win the favour of the jury, which took its decisions after votes in each of the categories. The three winners who had solid majorities or unanimous backing from the initial discussions onwards were Comeback Kid Jaydeep Barman, Purple Squirrel Eduventures, a Mumbai-based startup which connects college students to businesses, and BrowserStack, a software tools developer which is also based in Mumbai.

Kola of Kalaari Capital very narrowly beat Subrata Mitra of Accel Partners, whose investments include Flipkart and Freshdesk Technologies. Kola, who is an investor in Snapdeal, Zivame and Urban Ladder, benefitted because the jury gave greater weightage to the fact that Kalaari is not backed by any big-name fund.

ET14AUG15