ET Startup Awards 2026: 5 Comeback Kid Nominees Vie for Top Honor

For the startup and venture capital ecosystem, the Comeback Kid shortlist is a data point on founder resilience as a venture-backable trait. The 12th ET Startup Awards jury, led by Wipro's Rishad Premji, will pick winners from five Comeback Kid nominees on August 25 in Bengaluru, with past winners like Zomato, Lenskart, Delhivery, and Swiggy now publicly listed.

The 12th edition of the Economic Times Startup Awards (ETSA) entered its final stretch on August 18, 2026, with the disclosure of nominees for Best on Campus and Comeback Kid. The five Comeback Kid contenders—SolarSquare, Shadowfax, Scapia, Emergent, and Pratilipi—will face a secret-ballot vote by a jury chaired by Wipro executive chairman Rishad Premji when it meets in Bengaluru on August 25. The Best on Campus shortlist comprises Qosmic, Armatrix, Panoculon Labs, Dream Aerospace, and Plenome Technologies, five student-led ventures whose names signal a focus on frontier technologies including aerospace, deep tech, and emerging engineering.

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The five Comeback Kid contenders—SolarSquare, Shadowfax, Scapia, Emergent, and Pratilipi—will face a secret-ballot vote by a jury chaired by Wipro executive chairman Rishad Premji when it meets in Bengaluru on August 25.

Since launching in 2015, the ET Startup Awards have tracked the maturation of India's startup ecosystem from an early-stage experiment into a pipeline of publicly listed companies. Past winners such as Zomato, Lenskart, Delhivery, and Swiggy have gone on to list on stock exchanges, giving the awards a retrospective credibility that makes the Comeback Kid category especially meaningful. This year's jury is explicitly looking for founders building resilient and scalable businesses in frontier technology, a framing that elevates technical depth and the ability to survive failure over simple growth metrics.

The Comeback Kid shortlist is notable for its sectoral spread. SolarSquare, founded in 2015 in Mumbai by Shreya Mishra, Neeraj Jain, and Nikhil Nahar, is a full-stack residential rooftop solar company. It sells and installs home solar systems, helps customers access financing and subsidies, and provides monitoring, after-sales service, and performance guarantees across 20 Indian cities. Its investor base includes B Capital, Lightspeed, and Elevation Capital, a combination that spans US and India-focused venture firms and reflects the capital-intensive nature of distributed energy infrastructure.

Shadowfax, also founded in 2015, represents the logistics side of the comeback thesis. Based in Bengaluru and founded by Abhishek Bansal, Vaibhav Khandelwal, Praharsh Chandra, and Gaurav Jaithlia, Shadowfax operates as a new-age third-party logistics company providing express parcel, reverse logistics, and hyperlocal delivery services to ecommerce marketplaces and direct-to-consumer brands. Its nomination underscores how India's e-commerce boom has rewarded 3PL players that can flex across delivery formats and demand cycles, even as unit economics remain notoriously difficult.

Scapia, founded in 2022 by Anil Goteti, brings a fintech angle to the category. The Bengaluru-based travel fintech platform is built around a co-branded credit card that combines card spending, travel bookings, rewards, UPI transactions, and airport privileges. Its early backers include General Catalyst, Peak XV Partners, Z47, and Elevation Capital, and the company earns through bank and network partnerships as well as bookings made on its app. The nomination suggests that investors and the jury view travel fintech's post-pandemic rebound as a viable comeback narrative.