Meet the winners of the first edition of National Startup Awards
Organised by DPIIT, the National Startup Awards' first batch of winners are expected to receive Rs 5 lakh in cash for innovation in their respective fields.
Along with the launch of an online startup discovery platform that would showcase the crème de la crème of the country's ecosystem, the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal trade announced the winners of the first edition of National Startup Awards.
The award was aimed at recognising not just outstanding startups and ecosystem enablers that have built innovative solutions, but also generated employment and wealth, as well as have had some sort of a social impact.
Entries were received across 12 sectors, and 35 sub-sectors, including agriculture, education, technology, finance, energy, food, health, space, tourism, security and urban services, among others. Women-led and founded startups, as well as those that impact rural areas were two special startup categories, while one exceptional incubator and one accelerator were recognised as well.
Karnataka sent in the highest number of applications, followed by Maharashtra and Delhi. The jury featured prominent ecosystem leaders such as NASSCOM President Debjani Ghosh; Co-founder and CEO of Prashant Tandon; Ritesh Agarwal, Founder and CEO of Rooms; Managing Director Rajan Anandan; Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre's Director S Somanath; and Dilip Asbe, Managing Director, CEO of NPCI, among many others.
Entries received for the National Startup Awards, state-wise
The startups that won in their respective categories were awarded Rs 5 lakh each, as well as opportunities to pitch their product to public authorities and corporates for potential pilot project and work orders, the DPIIT's official press statement said. The incubator and accelerator-category winners were a given Rs 15 lakh, each.
Below is a list of all the winners across the 12 sectors:
Agriculture
Winners: , under the ‘Farmer Engagement and Education’ subcategory; for their post-harvest technology which lets users click a picture of the commodity they’re buying and see how fresh it is; Nava Design and Innovation for inventing the world’s first robotic coconut sap tapping device; for addressing the green fodder shortage in India.
Education
Winners: RobotGuru, a tech company that seeks to teach students about robotics in an immersive environment; , a platform that allows students to study for their exams, free of cost.
Enterprise Technology
Winner: Online, an automated, voice-enabled digital assistant that helps workers in the informal sector find job opportunities.
Energy
Winner: for its eco-friendly and non-hazardous batteries created using aloe vera; Esyasoft for its energy-efficient smart grid IoT solution.
Finance
Winner: for offering financial services to merchants in the SME sector, enabling UPI payments and giving them the best loan rates in the market.
Food
Winners: , a marketplace for home-cooked food in India sourced from verified home chefs; Jackfruit365.com, an initiative that aims to streamline the Indian jackfruit market.
Health
Winners: , a smartphone app that lets patients monitor their health and connect real-time with virtual health coaches; , a startup that helps detect early-stage breast cancer using AI; Lifesciences, which has developed a manufacturing platform for topical thin films as an alternative to gels, creams, ointments; , a device that helps throat cancer patients who have lost their voice boxes to speak again.
Industry 4.0 (startups that use tools such as IoT, AI, Big Data, Robotics)
Winners: , which helps manufacturing-plant engineers predict equipment and performance issues in advance; - a startup that uses AI and ML to help reduce electricity costs; , a 3D printing company that uses carbon fibre to print, instead of plastic or metal; , an AR advertising startup; - a startup that provides underwater inspection solutions using robotics; GingerMind, an AI-powered smart glasses maker that helps visually impaired people function independently.
Space
Winners: Skyroot - an affordable, low-cost and easily mass-produced launch vehicle maker; Dhruva Space, which builds small satellite constellations; , a startup working on driving down the cost of access to space.
Security
Winners: , a company that feeds data into deep neural networks to extract information that could not have been possible without using advanced deep learning algorithms; , a cybersecurity platform.
Tourism
Winners: Feeinsta’s Fresh Rooms, a sanitation startup that addresses the issue of hygiene in public toilets; Param People’s Highway Delite, a platform that helps tourists plan their road trips better by providing them information about available facilities such as restaurants, washrooms, fuel pumps etc on the highways on India.
Some criteria used by the jury
Urban Services
Winners: , a company that builds brick-making machines; , a startup that offers keyless, dockless, shared mobility solutions; , a NPO company that has developed a smart public toilet solution, called ‘eco-mitra’; Taraltec, which provides clean drinking water in rural areas.
Special category: Campus
Winner: Genrobotics, a startup that has developed a manhole clearing robots to essentially eliminate the need for human sewage workers.
Special category: Women-led businesses
Winner: , a fluorescent dye company that manufactures for genomics research and molecular diagnostics.
Special category: Rural Impact
Winner: , an online, personalised learning platform that uses AI to help students, job seekers and employees discover courses they need to work in their respective fields more optimally.
Incubator
Winner: , an investor in early-stage social enterprises that helps startups grow, improve compliances, enable partnerships and networks and finally hit the market.
Accelerator
Winner: Brigade Real Estate Accelerator Programme - a module that helps companies create scalable businesses in sectors such as management, technology, strategy, HR, finance, and legal, among others.
Edited by Saheli Sen Gupta
