The plenary inaugural session was graced by key dignitaries of the ecosystem including Shri Amitabh Kant, G20 Sherpa & Former CEO, NITI Aayog, Shri Rajesh Kumar Singh, Secretary, DPIIT, Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MOC&I), Shri Sanjiv, Joint Secretary, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MOC&I), Shri Prashant Kumar Singh, CEO, Government e Marketplace (GeM), Shri Arvind Gupta, Head and Co-founder of Digital India Foundation, Anil Kumar Sagar, IAS Principal Secretary, Department of IT - Govt of UP, among others.
Shri Amitabh Kant, India’s G20 Sherpa & Former CEO, NITI Aayog said, “India's booming startup scene has indirectly created over 10 million jobs and fostered a vibrant gig economy of over 10 million individuals. This is a story of undeniable growth, and job creation is a major part of it. But the ambition should be even bigger: becoming the world's leading startup nation.”
Throughout the day, startups, incubators, soonicorns, unicorns, future entrepreneurs, and other key stakeholders attended key note sessions, panel discussions, and fire side chats of industry leaders including Shri Sivasubramanian Raman, CMD, SIDBI, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Co-founder and Executive Vice Chairman, Info Edge, Prashant Prakash, Founding Partner, Accel, Debjani Ghosh, President NASSCOM, Sanjay Nayar, Senior Vice President, ASSOCHAM, Founder and Chairman, Sorin Investment Fund, Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO, Zomato, and Archana Jahagirdar, Founder & Managing Partner, Rukam Capital among others.
There were sessions around the strategies for fostering creativity and disruption in startups, what does the next decade look like for the ecosystem, how can startups build multi-generational businesses and what are the opportunities for key sectors like Agritech, AI & SaaS, Climate Tech, Gaming and Deep Tech among others. Additionally, enriching sessions were held around how startups can scale their businesses globally.
The event witnessed participation of 21,123 key startup ecosystem stakeholders and connected them with event partners including Dalmia Bharat & Google (silver partners), Acko, Captain Fresh, Mobile Premier League (MPL), Jetsynthesis, Tally (bronze partners), IAN & Blume Ventures (session partners), IDFC First Bank (Bank partner), MM Active & India Mobile Congress (IMC) (Event partners) and Indian School of Business (ISB) (Academic partner). The event has theme based pavilions with focus on DeepTech, AgriTech, AI and also a dedicated pavilion on the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. The first day of the event was a resounding success.
