ET Startup Awards 2022: Exotel’s resilience makes it winner in the Comeback Kid category

For the Comeback Kid category, the ET Startup Awards 2022 jury was clearly looking to recognise the resilience of the founding teams and their ability to tackle the various vagaries of building a new-age technology business.

From the word go, the elite jury praised the grit that Exotel founders–Shivakumar Ganesan, Ishwar Sridharan and Sachin Bhatia–have displayed against many odds to build an Indian software play in cloud telephony for the world. And to the jury, Ganesan and Sridharan’s collective strength to helm Exotel through a long-lasting funding drought, while winning a loyal client base, seemed to have resonated. In fact, some jury members were also users of the software providers’ service, as they mentioned during the deliberations.