Raise a toast to our startup champs

This year's instalment of the ET Startup Awards have announced winners in 9 categories from a shortlist of 45 companies in a whole range of technology, business processes and innovations. But the startup ecosystem is the biggest winner, with a former winner, Freshworks, having made a successful initial public offering for over $1 billion and listed on Nasdaq, and other unicorns preparing to go public as well. Startups are emerging as preferred employers, routes to riches, vehicles for realising social purpose, the means of actualising your technological prowess, the wings of creative imagination that transports the purposeful dreamer to a land of her creation. And, when startups succeed and go public, offering their early backers a profitable exit, or when startups are bought out by established companies or even other startups, the result is new pots of fuel waiting to kindle new sparks of creativity, and nurture them into blazing successes.

We salute the winners in each category. However, the jury had trouble identifying the winner in each category, the nearest one or two contenders being almost as interesting and innovative. We hope our future juries would struggle ever harder, and that our own editorial teams that prepare the shortlist will spend even longer hours identifying potential members of the shortlist - that is the whole purpose of the Startup Awards, to inspire ever more people to join the new generation of value creation. While the companies on the shortlist sort themselves into a few categories, and online marketplaces, whether for financial products, mental health, used cars or something else, have more members than other categories, the fact is that the diversity of sectors in which people start up is growing.

And, the focus on technology is growing, whether of the software kind, materials, chemistry, semiconductor, robotics or space technology. Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly a common attribute of several products/services offered by the startups. So is social purpose. May their tribe multiply.