The co-founder of India’s fastest-growing PR-tech platform joins an elite cohort of business builders honoured at the Economic Times Entrepreneur Awards 2026, held at Sahara Star Hotel, Mumbai.
MUMBAI: Darshan Shah, Co-Founder & CEO of NewsReach, was recognised as the Entrepreneur of the Year in the Media & Entertainment category at the ET Entrepreneur Awards 2026, Edition III, held on March 25, 2026, at Sahara Star Hotel, Mumbai.
Darshan Shah, co-founder and chief executive of NewsReach, has been named the Entrepreneur of the Year in the Media & Entertainment category at the Economic Times Entrepreneur Awards 2026, Edition III. The ceremony, convened at the Sahara Star Hotel in Mumbai, brought together India’s most consequential business builders across sectors to celebrate entrepreneurial excellence and industry-reshaping innovation.
“Visibility is the new currency for businesses in the digital age. We built NewsReach to be the infrastructure layer through which brands, startups, and enterprises access every PR opportunity in India, and eventually across the Global South.”
Darshan Shah, Co-Founder & CEO, NewsReach Media Pvt. Ltd.
The Journey Behind the Recognition
A first-generation entrepreneur from Gujarat, Shah co-founded NewsReach alongside Soniya Kundnani. In 2022, both founders were honoured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list under the Media, Marketing & Advertising category, a recognition underscoring the platform’s early momentum and their combined vision. Strategic investors HT Media and Zee Media, two of India’s most established legacy media houses, backed the platform, signalling institutional conviction in the PR-tech thesis.
Founder Snapshot
- Company: NewsReach Digital Pvt. Ltd.
- Award: ET Entrepreneur of the Year — Media & Entertainment
- Edition: ET Entrepreneur Awards 2026, Edition III
- Venue & Date: Sahara Star Hotel, Mumbai — March 25, 2026
- Previous Recognition: Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2022 (Media & Marketing)
- Strategic Investors: HT Media & Zee Media
What the ET Entrepreneur Awards Represent
The Economic Times Entrepreneur Awards, presented under the B2B division of Times Internet Limited, is among India’s most rigorous recognitions for entrepreneurial achievement. Now in its third edition under the current format, the 2026 ceremony evaluated nominees across a comprehensive set of criteria including revenue growth, market impact, innovation in business model, team building, and contribution to the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Shah’s win in the Media & Entertainment category reflects not merely the scale NewsReach has achieved, but the structural novelty of its approach: turning public relations, historically a fragmented service market, into a technology-led infrastructure play with network effects, recurring revenue streams, and a defensible data moat built on 18 months of visibility graph data.
NewsReach is entering what Shah describes as a scaling phase, moving beyond its PR-distribution origins toward becoming the default visibility infrastructure for India’s 1 crore addressable SMBs. The company has set its sights on the Global South, MENA, and APAC as international expansion corridors.
This ET Entrepreneur Award adds to a growing body of external validation for a platform that is rewriting what it means to build media infrastructure in India, one visibility graph node at a time.
About the ET Entrepreneur Awards
Organised by the B2B division of Economic Times (Times Internet Limited), the ET Entrepreneur Awards recognise outstanding entrepreneurial achievement across industries in India and the Asia-Pacific. The 2026 edition (Edition III) was held on March 25, 2026, at Sahara Star Hotel, Mumbai.
Full winners list: b2b.economictimes.indiatimes.com/entrepreneur-awards/winners-list
