New Delhi, Oct 7 (KNN) Piyush Goyal, the Minister of Railways and Commerce & Industry released the Results of the National Startup Awards on Tuesday. The virtual felicitation ceremony was held in the August presence of Minister of State for Commerce & Industry Som Parkash.

To recognize and reward outstanding Startups and ecosystem enablers that are building innovative products or solutions and scalable enterprises, The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) has conceived the National Startup Awards.

The measure of success is not only the financial gains for the investors, but also the contribution to social good.

The first edition of the Awards invited applications across 12 sectors, which were further sub-classified into a total of 35 categories. These 12 sectors are Agriculture, Education, Enterprise Technology, Energy, Finance, Food, Health, Industry 4.0, Space, Security, Tourism and Urban Services.

Apart fr0m these, startups are to be selected fr0m those which create impact in rural areas, are women-led and founded in academic campuses.

A total of 1641 applications were received fr0m startups spread across 23 States and 4 Union Territories. These applicants included 654 Women-led, 165 academic institution based and 331 startups working in rural areas.

All applicants were evaluated against six broad parameters namely Innovation, Scalability, Economic Impact, Social Impact, Environmental Impact, and Inclusiveness and Diversity. After three rounds of detailed evaluation, 199 startups were selected for presentation before the jury. 192 out of these made presentations before the 15 specialist jury panels, which comprised of domain experts fr0m industry, investors and government.

31 applications were received fr0m incubators and 10 applications were received fr0m Accelerators. 9 incubators and 5 Accelerators were selected after three rounds of evaluation for presentation before Jury Panel. All of them gave presentations before the Jury.

The ‘Startup India Showcase’ and ‘Blockchain-based Certificate Verification System’ were also launched during the event.

The ‘Startup India Showcase’, a part of the Startup India portal, is intended to be an online discovery platform for the most promising startups of the country.

The ‘Blockchain-based Certificate Verification System’ will enable instant verification and access to certificates of recognitions issued by DPIIT. It can be accessed by Government Departments, procurement entities, investors, and other third parties to verify status of recognized startups for accessing different opportunities.

The minister called upon the startups to enlist themselves in the Government e-market place (GEM) so that they can offer their services to the Government Departments and large number of customers.