TiE London celebrated its first ever entrepreneur awards bringing together dynamic businessmen and young minds behind some famous start-ups at the Carlton Jumeirah from the Asian diaspora in the UK.
President, Nina Amin, MBE, kick-started the evening with an interview with Rajeev Misra, CEO of Softbank’s Vision Fund. In his interview, Misra gave an insight into the vision behind the largest technology fund ever raised of almost $100billion and talked about some of the disruptive technologies they are investing in.
Giving an example of OYO rooms, he explains how the market and business today centers around having the knowledge “of what kind of a house or a room will sell at what kind of price at the right time.”
Misra who has made an investment in about 70 odd companies in 18 months, talks about the digital advantage of internet penetration in our regular lives to the extent of buying food online. And as a message to the young entrepreneurs and start-up generation who is trying to break into the market, Mr. Misra reveals the simplest success mantra-
“You see a problem, find a solution!” he says matter-of-fact “The problem could simply be not finding a good doctor in time...there are lots of problems in our society and once you come up with a solution, devote a year to strategise your product. There is no shortage of capital in the market for a good idea!”
Hosted by actor Nitin Ganatra, the evening had six categories of award-winners ranging from entrepreneur of the year to the new concept, interpreneur of the year. Members of the jury came from diverse fields of medicine to politics to ensure careful consideration and included Lord Jitesh Gadhia, Baroness McGregor-Smith, CBE, Dr. Vijay Patel, Alison Cooper, and Jean De Fougerolles.
Priyanka bags the young entrepreneur of the year
Priyanka Raswant, co-founder and CEO of Join Highbrow Ltd. won this award for her inspirational on-demand video platform for children’s educational content.
Raswant, originally from Mumbai, is a lawyer who started this business out of her own concerns the amount of screen-time the children of the day are exposed to. Around the time that she and her husband decided to start a family she decided to “transform this screen-time into something more educational.”
“We are a curation as a service platform. On Highbrow, we have built artificial intelligence algorithms through machine learning that studies the child's behaviour patterns and preferences.” Raswant explains.
Simply put, this means that if a child is a frequent visitor on the platform and if he likes dinosaurs, so then the website will dig out video content similar to dinosaurs out of its 5,000+ library. Parents log onto this subscription-based platform which provides educational engaging content to kids of 1-11-year-old age group.
Indo-UK Institute of Health is the fastest growing business
The award for the “Fastest Growing business” went to the Indo-UK Institute of Health (IUIH) who have recently partnered with the NHS and grown their company’s valuation from £60,000 to $600M and more. Recently, IUIH has signed up a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Government of Uttarakhand for setting up an integrated IUIH Medicity in the state.
IUIH enables a global hub for medical tourism, medical equipment, and device manufacturing, pharmaceutical production; and cutting-edge medical research along with setting up of medical colleges and a training facility for allied health professionals.
Arora takes 'entrepreneur of the year' to his hotel
Surinder Arora, famous in the hospitality industry for his £225 mn worth Arora Hotels, won the award for his astonishing growth and expansion. The 60-year-old who came to the UK at the young age of 13 was “delighted” to receive the award, attributing how his success was a “testament to the hugely skilled teams I have around me and the support of my family.”
Mr Arora founded his business in 1999 when he was running a bed and breakfast service for British Airway’s airline staff near Heathrow. He saw an opportunity to develop this further, and he opened his first hotel with the backing of British Airways, “despite the banks thinking I couldn’t do it”, said Mr. Arora.
With practically no experience of building or running hotels, Mr. Arora now has a portfolio of ten hotels operating under a variety of international brands and another two hotels in development. And this award comes at a poignant time in the upward journey of Arora Group which is bidding to deliver the expansion of Heathrow's Terminal 3. The hotelier also believes that, “It is crucial that expansion happens in the most cost-efficient way both to protect the public purse and also to ensure airlines do not see a hike in charges which could be passed on to passengers.”
Mr. Arora has currently quoted £14.4bn as the total cost of the expansion of the airport terminal nearly half of the proposed amount put forward by the Heathrow Airport Limited (HAL) scheme which is estimated to be around £31bn.
“Our plans deliver significant cost savings through more efficient design, layout, and implementation. For example, we propose new terminal capacity to form a single hub campus with Terminal 5, instead of re-developing existing terminals in the Heathrow central area (Terminals 2 and 3) and a new terminal in the northern area, which would all be expensive and disruptive,” explained Mr. Arora.
Tourism and hospitality have always been a bright spot contributing to the UK's annual GDP. However, Brexit is the elephant in the room that has caused anxiety to perhaps most deep-pockets in the financial markets. And remained a whispered conversation underneath the glimmering chandeliers at Carlton Jumeirah. And echoing his worry about Brexit, Mr. Arora said-
“The hospitality industry is extremely dependent on migration. If we don’t have access to labour from overseas, staff shortages will become a real threat to the industry. It is crucial that the government acknowledges business’ need for flexibility as we work towards a deal with the European Union.”
Arora Group is always looking to strategically expand and diversify their property portfolio across the UK, and currently, they have various exciting live development projects, including a new hotel at Heathrow Terminal 2, the Luxury Windsor Park Hotel and Spa, and the Crawley Gateway Development in West Sussex.
So, what message does Mr. Arora have to 13-year-olds like him out there trying to make their mark in the industry?
“My advice is not to wait for the right opportunities to come around-you need to seek them out for yourself.”
Sujata Rastogi becomes the interpreneur of the year
Interpreneur of the year was a new category introduced at the evening, celebrating those entrepreneurial spirits in the corporate world who are bringing some lateral thinking sparkle to the table. Sujata Rastogi of HSBC took this one home.
Sujata holds an MBA from the London Business School and a certificate in Innovative Technology Leadership from Stanford. Her career in banking has chartered over a decade now wherein she has worked in varying sectors of private banking, asset management, and investment banking.
Her time at HSBC has led to a series of global transformation initiatives for the bank in new product development and digital services.
Dr. Sukhbinder Noorpuri receives the chairman's award
Dr. Sukhbinder Noorpuri founder of i-GP received The Chairman's award presented by Lord Jitesh Gadhia for his most innovative digital healthcare companies worldwide. The foundation for i-GP was developed back in 2015 and ultimately launched the service in January 2016. i-GP was started after watching patients wait weeks to see a doctor for low-risk conditions. After several years of development and refinement, i-GP has grown into a market leading digital care service with international industry recognition.
Dr Aleesha Dhillon, the Co-Founder and his wife has been fortunate to receive great support from their Chairman Tariq Syed and COO Mo Sabry, from very early days which gave them a particularly strong founding team.
“Currently we are a team of 15 working on the project and we are part of the NHS digital health accelerator programme where we are hoping to save the NHS over £1 billion per year by treating patients at a cost saving of 65%,” said Mr. Noorpuri.
They have also recently been selected to join the Mayor of London’s Business Accelerator Programme. And their service already operates nationally and they have treated patients online right up to the age of 84 years.
They have won and been shortlisted for 22 awards such as the Zenith Global Healthcare Award and the CEO Today Healthcare Award. They are also fully compliant with the CQC healthcare regulator as they have developed numerous innovations such as behavioural monitoring across the platform to prevent patients from gaming the system and misusing the service.
“We believe I-GP is the future of healthcare and has the opportunity to standardise the quality of care across the world. We have just returned from the Future Tech mission to India with the Department of International Trade. Next year we are travelling to China for a similar event and we are in the process of converting the Platform into 100 different languages.”
Vin wins the “woman of the year”
Serial tech entrepreneur, Vin Murria OBE took home the title of “Woman of the Year”. Over the decade, Vin has dabbled in the playing fields of venture capital, private equity among others in the software sector. She has spent close to seven years as the CEO of ACS plus which she had herself founded in 2008.
Prior to this Vin had a successful 5 years as the CEO of Computer Software Group plc which she first took private, backed by HG Capital then subsequently alongside a merger exited to US PE Hellman Friedman in July 2007 for $800m. And prior to this, Vin was the COO at Kewill Systems which she left at $1.8bn in 2000.
In 2007 Vin formed and fully funded a charitable foundation targeted at educating and supporting women in India and the UK.
The awards weren't the only highlight of the evening, there was also a fashion show from the hottest Indian label Monga’s. Wine and dinner enabled networking amongst the leading business minds and the evening closed with comedian Neil Mullarkey's inspirational parody, 'Don’t be Needy, Be Suceedy'.
