Business Today started identifying India's most happening start-ups well over a decade ago in 2007. This year we had a little over 100 start-ups that filed nominations. The start-ups have been divided into two categories, based on when they were set up - those that are 0-2 years old and those that are 2-4 years old.
The senior editorial team of BT vetted the applicants to eliminate those that had exceeded the age limit. We ended up with 43 companies in the 0-2 years' category and 36 in the two years-plus category. It is this list of start-ups that was placed before a jury comprising Manish Singhal, Founding Partner, pi Ventures; Dev Khare, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners; Abhinav Chaturvedi, Principal at Accel; Kanwaljit Singh, Managing Partner, Fireside Ventures; and Murali Talasila, Partner and Innovation Leader, PwC India.
In a discussion that lasted a little over two-and-a-half hours, the eminent jury identified 14 winners - six from the 0-2 years category and eight from the 2-4 years category. The identified start-ups are in diverse areas, including women's work-wear solutions, waterless personal hygiene products, using solar energy to purify water, vernacular social media platform and computer vision for deep learning.