Synopsis
India is teeming with early-stage startups, but very few awards are built for them. One Of A Kind, presented by Cashfree Payments and The Economic Times, is changing that.Listen to this article in summarized format
According to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, India added over 44,000 startups in 2025 alone, the highest single-year jump since the Startup India initiative launched a decade ago.
Yet, of the $13 billion Indian startups raised last year, early-stage companies (seed through Series A) captured just $3.2 billion across 831 deals, according to data platform TheKredible. Even more stark is the revelation from the NASSCOM-Zinnov India Tech Start-up Report 2025 that 85% of Indian tech startups never make it to Series A.
The ones that do make it, and those battling through the stages below it, are some of the most resilient founders. They are figuring out distribution, managing cash flows, optimising conversion, and building for scale, often all at once. They are also the ones the startup awards circuit ignores in favour of the same unicorns, the same late-stage companies with the biggest press teams, or those with the deepest pockets.
The inaugural One Of A Kind Startup Awards is a deliberate correction to that.
Co-created by Cashfree Payments and The Economic Times, One Of A Kind is far from a gala dressed up as a celebration of entrepreneurship. It is exclusively and unapologetically for startups that are Series A and below. This one’s for you if you haven’t raised a massive round, aren’t a household name, or are in the thick of building something truly original or unique.
Categories
Most startup awards prioritise vanity signals. Funding size. Valuation. Marquee names. Media coverage. Such proxies dominate evaluation, inherently favouring companies that have already arrived, not those in the process of becoming.
The One Of A Kind Startup Awards is structured around a completely different question: what does true-blue early-stage excellence actually look like? This question has five answers in the form of five award categories, which is unlike anything the Indian startup awards circuit has seen.
- AI Innovator is not for startups that have added a chatbot to their product or bolted on a large language model for good press. It is for founders who’ve meaningfully embedded artificial intelligence (AI) into the core of what they do and built a competitive advantage that is hard to replicate.
- GTM Excellence recognises companies that have cracked the early-stage bugbear of reaching customers at scale. Not luck, not a one-time spike, but a repeatable, brilliant distribution engine that others in the category are still trying to figure out.
- Category Creator is for the rare breed of founder who did not enter a market, but made one. India's startup ecosystem has produced a handful of true category creators over the years. This award finds the next ones before the rest of the world catches up.
- Customer Experience Delight honours something that is criminally underrated these days: customer experience so exceptional that buyers become advocates. And for the record, we aren’t talking discounts, dark patterns, or conditional reviews.
- Bootstrapped Champion facilitates founders who built something meaningful without any external funding and persevered through everything that comes with this decision. In a milieu that equates success with fundraising, this category is a long-overdue statement.
What’s more, the evaluation itself is structured to match. Every applicant will go through an independent assessment process, supported by ecosystem insights and operator experience. For final deliberations, there’s the One Of A Kind jury, which will consist of startup practitioners who know exactly what early-stage excellence looks like from the inside, because they have lived it.
For Cashfree Payments, the initiative reflects the larger belief that the most defining companies are often built long before they are widely-recognised.
The window is short. The opportunity is not.
Calls for entry conclude on May 28, followed by data-backed evaluation and a jury meet before a grand felicitation ceremony on July 20 to announce the winners.
If you are building something earlier than Series A, the truth is that very few platforms exist that are genuinely built to see you. Most awards will ask you to compete against companies that have raised ten times what you have, have ten times the team, and have been at it for ten times as long. The One Of A Kind Startups Awards 2026, on the other hand, examines whether your startup is genuinely, demonstrably, one of a kind.
If the answer is yes, or if you believe it will be, this is not an award you want to hear about after the window has closed.
Nominations for the One Of A Kind Startup Awards 2026 are now open. Apply now to put yourself up for contention.
(This article is generated and published by ET Spotlight team. You can get in touch with them on [email protected])
