ET Startup Awards 2024: Lenskart gets 10/10, bags top honours
Lenskart bagged top honours at the 10th edition of India’s most prestigious awards for entrepreneurship — The Economic Times Startup Awards (ETSA).
A high-powered jury led by Infosys cofounder and chairman Nandan Nilekani picked the Gurgaon-based company as the Startup of the Year at a meeting in Bengaluru on Wednesday. The award recognised Lenskart’s success in building a fast-growing, large-scale, omnichannel consumer retail venture while creating an entirely new category, the jury noted. The 10-member jury chose eight winners from a shortlist of 41 contenders after deliberating for over 2.5 hours.
Lenskart, founded by Peyush Bansal, Amit Chaudhary, Ramneek Khurana and Neha Bansal in 2010, joins a list of eminent winners that have previously won the top prize. These include Zomato, Zerodha, Razorpay, OfBusiness, Delhivery, Oyo Hotels & Homes, Swiggy, Freshworks and Ola. Three of these—Zomato, Delhivery and Freshworks—are now listed companies, highlighting the strength of the businesses that have snagged the coveted award since its inception in 2015. Ola spun out Ola Electric as a separate entity and went public a month ago. Ola Electric was also one of the six nominees for the Startup of the Year category.
“The overarching theme of ETSA is that the so-called startup world is coming of age,” Nilekani said after the jury meeting. “We learnt a lot because many of these companies which we may not have heard of, some technology innovations we have not seen and even the quality of entrepreneurs… In all, this was a
