This article was first posted on YourStory. 

Over the last few years, the SaaS industry in India has grown by leaps and bounds. Though the industry started small, today, this segment boasts of a combined annual recurring revenue of $2 billion, consisting of more than 10,000 companies.

The coming together of engineering and product talent, venture capital, and the drive of founders to take their companies global has made this industry the one to watch out for. According to a recent report by Google and Accel, the Indian SaaS sector is on the way to hit the $10 billion revenue milestone by 2025.

This is why, for the first time, SaaSBoomi, the umbrella organisation for all Software as a Service (SaaS) companies and startups in India, has come out with a set of awards recognising the companies in this sector across various categories.

The unique aspect of the SaaSBoomi Awards is that it is judged entirely by the SaaS community, with no involvement from any outside parties or individuals.

The awards were held for achievements in eight categories – Breakout SaaS of the Year, Bootstrapped SaaS Startup of the Year, Deep-Tech SaaS Startup of the Year, Category Creator SaaS Startup of the Year, Vertical SaaS Startup of the Year, Moonshot Startup of the Year, B2D SaaS Startup of the Year, and SaaS Startup of the Year.

The jury consisted of stalwarts of the industry: 

Aneesh Reddy – Co-founder and CEO of Capillary Technologies; Ashwini Asokan – Founder and CEO of Mad Street DenGirish Mathrubootham – Founder and CEO of FreshworksKrish Subramanian – Co-founder and CEO of ChargebeeManav Garg – Founder and CEO of Eka Software; Suresh Sambandam – CEO of Kissflow; and Pallav Nadhani – Co-founder and CEO, Ex-FusionCharts.

There were five startups shortlisted in each category, with one of them declared as the winner. Here are the winners in each category.

Bootstrapped Startup of the Year – Kovai

Kovai
Saravana Kumar, founder and CEO, Kovai

This London-headquartered enterprise SaaS company offers multiple products primarily in the areas of Microsoft BizTalk and Azure Serverless environments, as well as for B2B entities. It has its development centre in Coimbatore.

Breakout Startup of the Year – Hubilo

Hubilo founders
Hubilo founders: Mayank Agarwal (left) and Vaibhav Jain

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought out the critical technological role played by Hubilo. As a platform provider of intelligent virtual events, Hubilo provides key insights to CMOs and event organisers, and sponsors to track the attendee engagement of events.

Category Creator SaaS Startup of the Year – Acceldata

Acceldata
Acceldata founder Rohit Choudhary

The data management tools created by Acceldata enables enterprises to measure, monitor, and model the information that moves across different pipelines. Acceldata’s technology platform can provide this on a single pane to create data observability.

DeepTech Startup of the Year – Entropik Tech

Ranjan Kumar, Entropik Tech
Ranjan Kumar, CEO, Entropik Tech

Entropik Tech is a leader in Emotion AI enabling global brands leverage actionable emotion insights to deliver superlative marketing, brand and product experiences.

DevTools (B2D) Startup of the Year – Hasura

Tanmai Gopal and Rajoshi Ghosh
Hasura founders: Tanmai Gopal (left) and Rajoshi Ghosh

Hasura enables easy access to data by instantly composing a GraphQL API that is backed by databases and services so that the developer team (or API consumers) get immediately productive. The nature of GraphQL itself and Hasura’s dynamic approach makes integration and iteration easy.

Vertical SaaS Startup of the Year – Cardinality

Cardinality.ai
The team at Cardinality.ai. Picture credit: Cardinality.ai

Cardinality has developed an asset-light solution that offers easy-to-configure, low-code platforms based on AI and ML technologies, thus helping the ecosystem of welfare service stakeholders, especially the healthcare sector, to access case information on the go.

Moonshot Startup of the Year – OkCredit

okcredit
OkCredit founders (from left): Gaurav Kumar, Harsh Pokharna and Aditya Prasad

OKCredit simplifies credit account management for shop owners and their customers. It is a mobile-based solution that enables the recording of credit/payment transactions digitally all across the country.

SaaS Startup of the Year – Postman 

Postman Abhinav Astana
Postman Founder & CEO Abhinav Asthana

Postman turned into a unicorn last year, joining the list of other SaaS companies in the $1 billion valuation club. It is a collaboration platform for API development and simplifies each step, thereby making the entire process faster.