16th January 2023 marked the 7th National Start Up Day. An event was hosted in New Delhi with Commerce & Industry Minister, Shri Piyush Goyal, as the Chief Guest who conferred the awards to the winners. This was the 3rd edition of the national start up awards which received over 2600 applications from companies across 31 states and UTs of India.
The selection process spanned across a whole year, requiring companies to clear multiple rounds of screening. Applicants had to make videos to showcase their products and explain the impact for society as a whole. The jury consisted of more than 50 people overall, across the rounds, with members including July Ventures Managing Partner Amitab Shrivastava, Orios Venture Partners Anup Jain, and industry stalwarts such as Sanjeev Bikchandani, who spoke about the importance of the startup culture and commended the government as being the first to understand the role startups play in the development of the nation. He added that the “some of the startups of today, are the giants of tomorrow”. The winning startups (per category) will be awarded ₹5 lakh each, and the winning incubator and accelerator will be awarded Rs. 15 lakhs respectively.
At the event, 2 other platforms were also inaugurated, MAARG – which stands for Mentorship, Advisory, Assistance, Resilience, and Growth. This platform is envisioned to facilitate mentorship between startups and entrepreneurs across sectors, stages, and functions. It already has 100s of startups and mentors registered on it. The second was the Investor Connect portal, which as the name suggests, seeks to link investors & VCs to startups in India, providing a unique opportunity to companies in the remotest corners of the country! From the applications received, half of them came from tier 2 and 3 cities, a true testament to the fact that Start Up India has impacted the whole nation.
We spoke to one of the winners of the NSA 2022 – Lynkit – in the category of Industry 4.0. Lynkit is a supply chain automation firm that has worked with more than 5000 enterprises over its last 5 years including Delhivery, Blue Dart, RIVIGO, Samsung, LG Electronics, Bharat Petroleum, Aditya Birla Group and CMA CGM logistics park. They develop their own proprietary hardware and software. The co-founder, Mr. Uddhav Kumar said the award was a culmination of the team’s hard work over the last few years, and faith that the clients and partners have shown. He said their main focus is to help companies reduce their logistics cost via their enterprise and SaaS solutions. The company along with its 125 full time employees, has 6 products in the market today covering warehouse management, route and delivery optimisation, real time tracking, factory automation and port management systems.
