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Sports entrepreneur Sidhhant Agarwal nets top CII award for democratising the beautiful game
MUMBAI: When the bespectacled, geek like Sidhhant Agarwal collected the Confederation of Indian Industry’s ‘sports entrepreneur of the year’ award earlier this week, he did what any self-respecting founder would do: he passed the trophy to his team. In entrepreneurship, he reckons, success isn’t about the sprint—it’s about lasting long enough to watch your solution actually solve something.
For seven years, Agarwal’s brainchild SportVot has been doing precisely that: making sports streaming so affordable that even the scrappiest local tournament can look like the Premier League. The platform turns any match into a broadcast-ready event without requiring organisers to flog the family silver.
Before founding SportVot in January 2019, Agarwal had already clocked more than a decade building products for the likes of Oracle and CashCare. Three years as an applications developer at Oracle, nearly two as lead engineer at CashCare, and a stint running ThisGameWeek (because one sports venture is never quite enough) gave him the technical chops and entrepreneurial itch to take the plunge.
The ministry of youth affairs & sports and an esteemed jury—including Anupam Goswami, Abhishek Binaykia, Ayon Sengupta, Vidushpat Singhania and former athlete Ashwini Nachappa—clearly thought he’d earned his stripes. Agarwal’s response? Gratitude to “every organiser, every coach and athlete who trusted our tech on day one.”
From Mumbai’s tech trenches to the winner’s podium, it’s been quite a run. But as the young gun puts it, there’s a long way to go and much more to build. Game on.