Entrepreneurs: Those Who Did Not Win

Entrepreneurship is all about supporting and celebrating inspirational young people who are creating disruption in every corner of the world. Not lifting a trophy, doesn’t undermine the potential and the value of a disruptive idea. Winners are the ones who are prepared to do things differently.

The fourth edition of BW Businessworld Young Entrepreneurship Awards 2017 witnessed immense talent from across the country with most inspiring young game changers. We celebrate the innovative spirit, bold vision and resilience of the entrepreneurs who may not have lifted the trophy but took a simple idea and created something extraordinary.

Anouskha Adya
Anouskha Adya set up a digital marketing and design company Di-Mentions Studio. She describes Di-Mentions as a one-stop shop for all digital needs with an impressive clientele line-up including Amazon, Essel World and others. She is the brainchild behind a popular campaign, Lajja Diaries; a common platform for women all across the world to share their stories of sexual or physical abuse.

Gagneet Singh Ahuja
Gagneet Singh Ahuja, co-founder of Lifeeasy curated an innovative start-up which provides a variety of on-demand home services such as electrical, plumbing, carpentry, AC service, IT repair and others. Started two years back, this company is already aiming a revenue target of Rs 100 crore in the next 2-3 years along with creating job opportunities for skilled technicians.

Gautam Raj Anand
Two analysts observed a gap between content publishers, and content consumers in the market. This led to the creation of Hubhopper by the duo, where they formed a universal platform for publication and consumption of all kinds of content—visual, written, AV, and multimedia.

Harshvardhan Lunia
Harshvardhan Lunia who worked with an advisory business, soon realised the various inefficiencies that marred the SME lending space in India. Designing innovative credit solutions and delivering them in the simplest and most efficient manner to SMEs, Lunia embarked on an entrepreneurial route with LendingKart. LendingKart has disbursed loans in more than 925 cities across all 29 states and 7 UTs with success stories from Jamnagar to Guwahati and Kashmir to Kanyakumari.

Ajay Kola
From the outset, Ajay Kola focused on building Wisdomjobs.com into a job portal with a difference. He coined an innovative tool — The Pragnya Meter tool that allows job seekers to take unlimited, free skill assessments, and to showcase the scores obtained by them in order to catch recruiters’ attention.

Manoj Aggarwal
Amalgamation of travel and technology can create wonders; proves Manoj Aggarwal, founder xoxoday. A travel-tech company, xoxoday enables ‘last mile experiences’ for people, building a platform for local people to ‘host an experience’ and guests to ‘book an experience’ on the go. In short, it’s a long tail of the travel and entertainment industry.

Ram N. Kumar
From time immemorial Ayurveda has been a part of our lives. However, majority of people who want to use Ayurveda as first line of treatment never go for it either due to lack of reference or because they don’t trust a doctor. Ram N. Kumar, founder, NiroogStreet has bridged this gap by curating and training doctors and connecting them with the masses with the use of digital technology. In a short span of time, NiroogStreet has come to be known as the builder for an ecosystem for Ayurveda.