Chennai Start-ups conferred with prestigious TiE50 awards

Chennai: TiE50, a global prestigious award that recognizes top technology and technology-enabled start-ups, this year awarded 50 top entrepreneurs from across the world at TiECON 2020, the flagship conference of TiE Silicon Valley, the world’s largest entrepreneurship conference.  Out of these 50, ten top start-ups were selected to pitch their ideas to Mr Tim Draper, the legendary American venture capital investor from the Draper’s family.   Nominated by TiE Chennai, Agnikul Cosmos, a Chennai based start-up that builds rockets (launch Vehicles), was selected among the top 10 start-ups, pitch to Mr. Tim Draper as part of ‘Meet the Drapers`, a popular reality show in the United States. 

The prestigious TiE50 Award recognizes outstanding start-ups each year contesting in the TiE Silicon Valley’s premier annual awards.  84% of the winners have received more than a billion dollars in funding since the inception of this program.  

Commenting on the occasion, Ms Akhila Rajeshwar, Executive Director of TiE Chennai said, “We are extremely delighted that Agnikul Cosmos, Paperflite, SP Robotics, The Indus Valley, Twixor (Appiyo Technologies Pvt Ltd), nominated by TiE Chennai, were chosen for the TiE50 Awards.  It is a proud moment for the entire Chennai entrepreneurial ecosystem.   Agnikul Cosmos also had the opportunity to pitch to Tim Drapers.  Out of these 5 companies, 4 are portfolio companies of The Chennai Angels.” 

Commenting on their achievement, Srinath Ravichandran, Co-founder & CEO, Agnikul said, we were excited to have gotten this recognition. We met our very first investor at a TiE Chennai event in 2018. So, TIE always has played a special role in our journey. This additional recognition comes both as a validation of progress we have made and as a source of encouragement to the team. I never imagined I would be pitching to Tim Draper - at least not this soon. I was feeling multiple shades of excitement and nervousness going into the zoom call. However, once the story began, I got immersed in the journey of Agnikul. “