Mint Successfully Organized the 2nd Edition of The Startup ICON Summit & Awards
3 min read 31 Mar 2023, 06:24 PM ISTMint recently organized the second edition of its Startup ICON Summit & Awards on March 24, 2023, in New Delhi. The debut edition gathered a lot of momentum, offering a power-packed line-up of industry stalwarts who shared their valuable thoughts with the attendees
PremiumIndia has the 3rd largest start-up ecosystem and unicorn community, with more than 84,400 start-ups in 656 districts from 30 States and 7 Union Territories of India. Despite slow funding, India produced 21 new Unicorns in 2022, 3X more than China (the world’s second-largest start-up ecosystem). From 2015 to 2022, there has been a 15X increase in the total funding of start-ups (almost double). Expanding at a massive rate, the registration of new start-ups will rise at an annual rate of 25% during 2022-27. (Economic Survey 2021-22). India has been witnessing a surge in the number of unicorns and the pace at which they are created. Despite this accelerated activity, the start-ups still lag in achieving successful late-stage outcomes due to gaps in technology, funding, scaling, and more. Even though conditions are refining, the challenges facing India’s start-up ecosystem remain pertinent.
To better understand the holistic view of this sector, Mint recently organized the second edition of its Startup ICON Summit & Awards on March 24, 2023, in New Delhi. The debut edition gathered a lot of momentum, offering a power-packed line-up of industry stalwarts who shared their valuable thoughts with the attendees.
This year’s theme “India Racing Towards 250 Unicorns" also welcomed entrepreneurs, investors, founders, and leaders to the event space to connect and consider new insights on the best practices for startup growth. This highly interactive event was supported by partners like HPE, which is driving the next wave of intelligent edge and cloud choices; and Intel, which is providing businesses to improve productivity and streamline operations to work faster and smarter.
Shalil Gupta, Business Head, Mosaic Digital, in his opening address quoted the wonderful evening to be a “tryst with destiny." He said, “1 out of 13 unicorns globally are from India. That’s a massive scale to build up." Lauding the brimming confidence in the Indian startup community, he further elucidated that our country is churning out more unicorns because of the principles of zeroes; based on having a great talent, lesser wait time for delivery, pivoting when required, and a desire for assistance.
Furthermore, everyone in the audience was amazed by the all-women panel involving Nupur Garg, Founder, WinPE; Shivani Bhasin Sachdeva, Founder & CEO, India Alternatives; Sonali Jindal, Co-founder and COO, Ring/ Kissht; Bhawna Agarwal, Country Head- High Velocity Growth & Compute, Hewlett Packard Enterprise- delivering a compelling session on “Indian Start-ups--Is Funding Winter a Reality or Myth?" Shivani Bhasin Sachdeva dwelt on how the average investment after covid 19 raised from $8.5 billion a year to $60 billion a year in 2021. And we have been only comparing the ongoing panorama with the peak (2021). That shouldn’t be the case. Echoing these sentiments, the panel concluded that the quality of the deal volume makes a big difference than the quantity and believed that the funding winter will pass.
The pioneers from across industries also shared insights into crucial concepts like ‘Talent Attrition’, ‘The Ideal Toolkit for Making of a Super Brand’ and moved to equally engaging sessions like the importance of, ‘Building Resilience: A Retention-first Approach from Day Zero’ and enabling ‘Collaboration- Building Block to a Strong Start-up Ecosystem’. The discussion topics were plenty and a lot to take home for the attendees and offered not just thoughts, but actional playbooks that founders and entrepreneurs can implement in their organizations and make them future-ready.
Some of the eminent speakers of these dialogues were Akash Saxenaa, VP, Samsung India Electronics; Ankur Gattani, VP - Growth and Marketing, WebEngage; Vivek Sehgal, Country Head - South Asia, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, India; Ronnie Screwvala, Co-Founder & Chairperson, upGrad; Swati Arora, Director –Sales, Slack India among other esteemed business leaders from the country.
Post power-packed deliberation, the esteemed guests presented the Mint Startup ICON Awards 2023 to the selected startups and founders who are at the forefront of the revolution and torch bearers for innovation in the country. The grand success of the second edition ensures that the event will be back next year with more such unique discussions between the leaders of the business community.
