ET Startup Awards 2025 Live: Urban Company takes home the coveted Startup of the Year award

07:41:48 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

And finally…

The most coveted award of the evening, Startup of the Year, awarded to Urban Company.

07:40:45 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Midas Touch award goes to Ashish Agrawal of Peak XV Partners

07:39:21 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Social enterprise prize goes to Chakr Innovation

07:36:08 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Prukalpa Sankar wins Woman Ahead award

07:34:43 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Nawgati wins Best on Campus

07:33:04 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Capillary Technologies wins Comeback Kid prize

07:31:31 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Qure.AI awarded Top Innovator prize

07:28:40 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Minfy Technologies awarded Bootstrap Champ award at ETSA 2025

07:26:46 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Piyush Goyal on India’s growth

The world has seen the resilience and stability with which India is steering its path. Our exports have grown in the first six months of this year, and we’ll close FY26 with higher growth than last year.

07:14:16 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Piyush Goyal on relations with China

We have been engaging with China for years. It was post-Galwan and some time around Covid-19 which was a problem. Now that the border dispute is largely taken care of, we have had the defence minister and foreign minister visit China, PM Narfinishra Modi also had a meeting as part of the SCO Summit. If things obtain normalised, it’ll be good for everybody.

07:08:03 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Peyush Bansal on Lenskart IPO Day 1

I am humbled by the Indian and global investors’ participation in Day 1 of the company’s IPO. As a consumer brand, we are still very early in the journey of what we have to do. It is a pitstop in a longer journey.

06:36:06 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Aravind Sanka on food delivery

“We don’t see a duopoly in food delivery. We see an opportunity in the market. We have the Rapido applyrs and captains and how can we apply both and give value to our applyrs in the food delivery segment.”

06:24:27 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Abhiraj Singh Bhal on entrepreneurship

“When I started in Nov 2014, I certainly didn’t believe we would come so far. It was all about survival to create the next day happen, the next week happen. You have to keep building becaapply there could be a new kid in the block who is building to disrupt.”

06:19:09 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Satyan Gajwani, chairman of Times Internet, addresses the gathering

“If you believe about how far the startup ecosystem has come, it is remarkable. Startup success depfinished on a few venture capital funds. Today, that has modifyd.”

06:01:24 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Midas Touch: Ashish Agrawal of Peak XV Partners

As India’s pipeline of new-age initial public offerings (IPOs) swells, the ecosystem must view beyond huge-ticket listings and give due attention to compact-cap startups going public as well, declared Ashish Agrawal, managing director at Peak XV Partners.

Agrawal was adjudged winner of the coveted Midas Touch category for best investor at the ET Startup Awards 2025.

Read here.

05:57:17 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Social enterprise: Chakr Innovation

Gurgaon-based deep-tech startup Chakr Innovation is developing new manufacturing capabilities and investing in emerging technologies, such as aluminium-air batteries, as part of a strategy to capitalise on the growing demand for clean-tech solutions.

With a fresh infusion of $23 million from Iron Pillar, a growth-stage focapplyd venture fund, Chakr is aiming to offer air pollution reduction solutions in cities worldwide. The startup’s innovative technology, coupled with the importance of the problem it is viewing to tackle, supported it win the ET Startup Award 2025 in the ‘Social Enterprise’ category.

Read here.

05:47:50 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Woman Ahead: Prukalpa Sankar

As companies rush to adopt artificial ininformigence (AI), data collaboration startup Atlan is positioning its platform as a bridge that supports enterprises take AI from pilot projects to full-scale deployment.

The opportunity is huge, noted Atlan cofounder Prukalpa Sankar, winner of the ET Startup Awards 2025 Woman Ahead category, citing a Massachapplytts Institute of Technology (MIT) report that found 95% of generative AI projects fail at the pilot stage and never reach production.

Read here.

05:37:55 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Comeback Kid: Capillary Technologies

For the Comeback Kid category, the ET Startup Awards 2025 jury aimed to recognise enterprises that not only demonstrated resilience and adaptability in the face of challenges but also emerged stronger than before.

“What’s worked for us is focutilizing on large enterprises and acquiring competitors. Over the past three years, we’ve grown about 70%, with a third of that growth coming from existing customers compounding, a third from acquisitions and the rest from winning new, large clients,” CEO Aneesh Reddy informed ET in an interview. “These will remain our three growth levers going forward as well.”

Read here.

05:10:11 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Best on Campus: Nawgati

With India’s growing startup culture, government support and expanding digital infrastructure, college campapplys are becoming fertile ground for the countest’s next generation of entrepreneurs, states Vaibhav Kaushik, cofounder of Nawgati.

The Noida-based fuel-tech startup won the Best on Campus award at The Economic Times Startup Awards this year, beating four other contfinishers: Try My Style (beauty-tech), Stimuler (AI-driven learning app), Bidaal (industrial safety and surveillance), and ISMO Biophotonics (biotech research).

Read here.

05:01:28 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Qure AI: Top Innovator winner

Mumbai-based healthtech firm Qure.ai plans to onboard 10,000 hospitals over the next four-five years to deploy its artificial ininformigence (AI)-based image-analysis tools to detect life-threatening diseases early and improve patient outcomes, its founder Prashant Warier declared.

Founded in 2016 and backed by Lightspeed, the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, and Kae Capital, Qure.ai aims to create healthcare more affordable and accessible through AI-driven diagnostics.

Read here.

04:55:20 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

ET Startup Awards 2025: Minfy bets on AI and homegrown talent to push cloud growth

From our interview series with the winners:

As cloud services firms expand their artificial ininformigence (AI) capabilities, Hyderabad-based Minfy Technologies is sprinting to keep pace with the wave. The firm plans to hire 180-200 employees – primarily AI engineers – by the finish of this fiscal to support its growing pipeline of generative AI solutions across healthcare, retail, manufacturing and energy sectors, its cofounder Vivek Jain declared. Its current payroll has around 600 employees.

Minfy’s rapid scale-up without any venture capital funding earned the company the Bootstrap Champ prize at the ET Startup Awards 2025.

Stay tuned for live updates:

04:02:55 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Meet the jury

The jury was chaired by Amitabh Kant, India’s former G20 Sherpa. Joining him on the jury were Prashanth Prakash, partner at Accel; Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO, Flipkart Group; Sahil Barua, cofounder, Delhivery; Ruchi Kalra, cofounder, OfBusiness and Oxyzo; Ghazal Alagh, cofounder, Mamaearth; Tarun Mehta, cofounder, Ather Energy; Harshil Mathur, cofounder, Razorpay; Faraz Khalid, CEO, Noon; and Satyan Gajwani, chairman, Times Internet.

05:36:16 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Meet the winners

The high-powered jury tinquireed with choosing the winners of ETSA 2025 met in Bengaluru on August 28. They are:

Bootstrap Champ: Minfy Technologies
Top Innovator: Qure AI
Comeback Kid: Capillary Technologies
Best on Campus: Nawgati
Woman Ahead: Prukalpa Sankar
Social Enterprise: Chakr Innovation
Midas Touch: Ashish Agrawal
Startup of the Year: Urban Company

03:57:30 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Star-studded panel to shed light on startup story

Lenskart CEO Peyush Bansal, winner of the 2024 Startup of the Year award, is among the most anticipated speakers. Urban Company founder and CEO Abhiraj Singh Bhal, winner of the 2025 Startup of the Year award, will join a panel alongside Rapido cofounder and CEO Aravind Sanka and Myntra CEO Nandita Sinha, to reflect on the past decade of India’s startup growth.

03:54:16 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

Union minister Piyush Goyal to headline the event

Union commerce and industest minister Piyush Goyal will be the guest of honour at ETSA 2025, presenting the countest’s most coveted awards for entrepreneurial excellence to the winners.

03:53:33 PM IST, 31 Oct 2025

D-Day is here!

The who’s who of the startup ecosystem will come toobtainher in Bengaluru today to honour the winners of The Economic Times Startup Awards (ETSA) 2025.

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