Ravi Srinivasan, the Chief Executive Officer of Craftsman Automation, has won the Established Entrepreneur of the Year award for the year 2015, instituted by the Entrepreneur’s Organization Coimbatore.

Entrepreneur’s Organization Coimbatore conducted its fourth edition of the Entrepreneur of the Year Awards’ ceremony on Friday. The organization, which had instituted two awards for the established and emerging entrepreneurs, further included a category to honor woman entrepreneurs under the Woman Entrepreneur of the Year. As many as 100 entrepreneurs were nominated for the awards of which 15 women entrepreneurs also featured in the nominations.

Anand Purushothaman, the Chief Executive Officer of the Payoda Technologies, won the Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year award for reaching more number of customers in the last one year. The outcome of the company, whose average age is 24 according to Anand, has doubled in one year.

The Woman Entrepreneur of the Year award was given to Hemalatha Annamalai for her innovative introduction of electronic based two wheelers, which are both feasible and eco-friendly.

The winners were selected by a panel of judges including top industrialists and members of Entrepreneur’s Organization Coimbatore. The awards were distributed by Gopal Srinivasan, the Chairman and Managing Director of TCS Capital Funds Limited, Mridula Ramesh of Sundaram Textiles, Deepti Reddy of WOW Hyderabad, Shamid Khemka of SynapseIndia and Vivek Bhargava of iProspect.

Giving away the awards, Gopal Srinivasan from TVS Capital Funds said that Coimbatore had good potential for entrepreneurial endeavours and many people could invent new things if they had the heart. “Young minds should be innovative and creative and the above 40’s should be like Tennyson’s Ulysses. We should look to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield,” he added.