2017 TiE Lumis Awards: Jury and Winners
Ever since its inception, the TiE Lumis Awards have received an overwhelming number of entries from startups all over the country. This year was no different. It was an exigent task to evaluate startups based on various parameters such as impact, planning and execution, comparative positioning to the competitors, differentiators, value proposition. Thereafter, the list was befittingly narrowed down to the top 20, out of which six startups were given the much-coveted opportunity to pitch to a jury comprising of an interesting blend of notable leaders from major industries:
- Neeraj K Singhal — Angel Investor
- Rajiv Viz — Managing Director at Carzonrent
- Sunil Kumar — President of Business World
- Sandeep Sinha — Managing Partner at Lumis Partners
- Rohit Bhayana — Managing Partner at Lumis Partners
The three startups that walked away with the winning trophy (in no specific order) are Moglix, ShareChat and Unilodgers. The unique factor that gave these three startups an edge over others was their ability to solve large complex problems at scale. They exude infectious passion and promise high potential of becoming market leaders. They define the very purpose, values and beliefs on which the foundation of TiE Lumis Awards rests.
The world’s first and largest marketplace for student accommodations with an outreach to 170+ countries. Since last year, this platform has booked over 1.5 million nights at student accommodations in the United Kingdom and Australia. The startup continues to register 2–3x growth annually. Currently, it is working actively on offering accommodation to every single student city around the world.
The Co-founders — Vaibhav Verma and Shipra Jain — identified this gap when they were studying together in the UK. Vaibhav is a finance and risk management professional. Shipra has a background in economics and human resources. With more than 10 years of experience of working with each other, they started out by representing a number of British Universities in India as their official representatives and helping them recruit students from India and have now evolved their company in to a platform where students can find accommodation.
A content broadcasting and discovery platform built for the natively non-English speaking next billion users of the internet. It is available in 10 different Indian languages and 17 dialects. It is optimized both in technology and UX for the first time internet user. The app has been installed 18 million times, with 5 million active users who share more than 100million times a month.
ShareChat founders Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Pratap Singh and Ankush Sachdeva, met at a college hackathon at IIT-Kanpur in 2012 that they had jointly won. They attempted launching startups 17 times with internet products ranging from real-estate portals to anonymous messengers until they got it right with ShareChat three years ago.
An Asia based e-commerce company specializing in the B2B procurement of industrial products. It extends expertise in the supply chain to solve problems related to digitization of supply chain as well as making it GST compliant. The platform has served more than 250 leading organizations and 10000+ SMEs across India. Moglix’s uniqueness lies in its ability to integrate technology with domain expertise in providing completely digital and hassle-free supply chain management solutions.
The Founder, Rahul Garg is a tech enthusiast. The IIT Kanpur and ISB Hyderabad alumnus has extensive experience in strategy, product management and operations in the technology industry. Before launching Moglix in August 2015, he was the Head of Advertising & Strategy at Google Asia. He has also served as Chairperson of Marketing and AdTech committee at IAB, Singapore. He holds 16 US patents in the domain of product management and technology.
We thank our Jury members and wish the winners a great and successful entrepreneurial journey ahead.
Team @LumisPartners
