Top Indian Women Entrepreneurs
“Feminism is nothing but the power to believe in women just as much as believing in someone else.”
Entrepreneurship has proceeded to become a quite successful occupation for the livelihood, if accompanied with favourable demographics, increased funding, evolving technology and an innovating mind.
History shows that it had always been men’s job to work and earn. But now the time is bringing change with itself and women are breaking the old conservative bonds to contribute their share of intelligence to society, bringing a huge change in the economical and social status. A primarily male-dominated world is now growing rapidly with the increased involvement of women in the business sector.
Women Entrepreneurs in India, with the aid of their sheer talent and hard work, are rewriting all the tales of the business world.
According to the reports released by Bain and Co. and Google a titled Women Entrepreneurship in India – Powering the economy with her, Women entrepreneurship in India holds the power to generate 150-170 million jobs by 2030.
Now let’s have a look at a few of the most powerful women entrepreneurs of India.
1. Falguni Nayar: Founder Nykaa
Famous as one of the most influential entrepreneurs, Falguni Nayar is the founder of Nykaa.com.
Falguni is listed among the top women entrepreneurs in India. She graduated from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. She worked at Kotak Mahindra Capital Co. for more than 18 years. She was given the title of “Most Powerful Women in Business” in 2017 by Business Today and received the “Woman Ahead” award at the Economic Times Start-up Awards 2017.
Nykaa:
Nykaa deals with the beauty, wellness and fashion products of Indian lifestyle. Started off as a multi-brand online beauty retailer, Nykaa has now expanded its composure through a mobile app and brick-and-mortar stores.
Recently, Nykaa has raised around 5000 Cr. funding from its tremendous IPO. With this IPO, now Falguni Nayar has become the country’s biggest self-made billionaire.
2.Divya Gokulnath: Co-founder BYJU’S
Byju’s an EdTech platform is co-founded by Divya Gokulnath.
She attained her B.tech in Biotech from RV College. After graduating, she started preparing for her GRE (Graduate Record Examinations), for which she met Byju Raveendran as her mentor. Later, started teaching at Byju’s and got married to Byju Raveendran.
In 2019, she got the chance to featured as one of Linkedin’s top voices.
Byju’s:
Byju’s is known to be most important ed-tech organisation and was valued at US$15 billion in April 2021. Byju’s provide educational resources for students of classes 1 – 12 and competitive exams like JEE, NEET, CAT and IAS.
3. Sneha Choudhry: Co-Founder ZoloStays
Sneha Choudhary co-founded ZoloStays, a company providing safe, hygienic and premium co-living expanses to students, professionals and organisations.
She has the honour of being prized a gold medal from IIM Kozhikode and has an engineering degree from RV College of Engineering, Bangalore along with a ten years experience in leading globally settled companies like Oracle and Deloitte as a strategy and operations consultant.
Zolostays:
Providing fully managed, long term affordable stay to students, professionals and organizations ZoloStays has become a great phenomenon as a co-living operator across ten cities with 45,000 live beds and more than 70,000 customers.
Recently they had planned to add 30,000 beds this year and strikes to achieve the target of 200,000 beds by December 2022.
4. Ghazal Alagh: Co-founder Mama Earth
MamaEarth, a safe, hygienic beauty and baby skincare company is co-founded by Ghazal Alagh who graduated with a BA in IT from Punjab University and also studied Modern Art & Design and Applied Arts at the New York Academy of Arts. Her career took rear as a Corporate Trainer at NIIT.
She has got the honour of being awarded at the Business World 40 under 40 Awards in association with BW Disrupt for being a change-maker and corporate leader.
Mama Earth:
MamaEarth started as a safe beauty and baby skincare company which offers completely toxin-free skincare, haircare and baby care products.
The company is a team of 300 members and provides its services to about 11,000 pin codes across India. The D2C (direct to customer) platform crossed an annualised revenue run rate of Rs 500 crore.
5. Swati Bhargava: Co-founder Cash Karo
Swati Bhargava is well known as the most awarded and famous women entrepreneurs in India. She co-founded CashKaro in the year 2013 alongside her husband Rohan. She completed her education at the London School of Economics and later started working at Goldman Sachs for around five years.
She got the chance to represent India at Blackbox Connect – Female Founders Edition 2015 and got featured in Fortune India under 40. Asian Women of Achievement Awards nominated her for the Young Achiever Category in the year 2011.
CashKaro:
In the world of online banking, CashKaro enables users to compare prices, earn extra cashback and acquire free coupons across 1000+ e-commerce sites like Flipkart, Amazon.in, Tata Cliq, Myntra, etc. It has came to be known as the larger cashbank and coupons site, supported by honourable Mr Ratan Tata and VC firms, Kalaari Capital.
6. Richa Kar: Co-founder Zivame
Richa Kar is the co-founder of Zivame, a women’s fashion brand company based in Bangalore, along with Kapil Karekar in 2011.
Setting off from Jamshedpur, she completed her education at BITS Pilani. Then achieved her Masters degree in 2007 at the Narsee Monji Insititue in Management Studies.
Zivame:
Zivame is a Bangalore-based women’s fashion brand company which was launched as an online lingerie retailer in 2011, headlining hundreds of styles for Indian women. The brand has attained a great feat being merely a startup to building a sustainable, fast-growing and profitable company by ascertaining its lingerie and active wear brand in the industry.
7. Radhika Aggarwal: Co-founder Shopclues
Radhika Aggarwal is the co-founder of Shopclues and the first woman to enter the Unicorn Club.
She holds an MBA degree from Washington University in St. Louis and also a post-graduation degree in advertising and public relations. She was a part of an executive program at Stanford University and also worked for companies like Nordstrom and Goldman Sachs. She had gained about 14 years of experience in various sectors such as fashion, lifestyle, e-commerce and retail in the US.
Shopclues:
ShopClues has gained the title of India’s first and the largest managed marketplace, founded in July 2011. The company has 5cr listed products and over 500000+ merchants.
The marketplace ships in over 30K pin codes across India, established out of Gurgaon along with thousands of online stores. ShopClues is an Indian subsidiary of Clues Network Inc., a US Corporation, and is funded by leading institutional investors.
Singapore based company Qoo10 owned ShopClues in 2019, in an all-stock deal valued at around US$70 million.
8. Upasana Taku: Co-founder Mobikwik
Upasana Taku has founded the fin-tech firm Zaakpay and co-founded Mobikwik, she is given the title of one of the most successful women entrepreneurs.
She completed her B.Tech in Industrial Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Jalandhar and MS in Management of Science & Engineering from Stanford University, US.
In later years, she joined HSBC in San Diego and also worked at Pay Pal where she learned about payment systems in the Americas, Asia and Europe, risk detection and fraud management, user experience and design.
In 2008, Upasana returned back to India and decided to start a company. The right person met her at the right moment, her IITian friend, Bipin Preet Singh who was looking for new opportunities and they founded Mobikwik together, in August 2009.
Mobikwik:
India’s leading fin-tech platform is known to be Mobikwik that is operating businesses in consumer payments, payment gateway and financial services. The fin-tech start-up’s payments network is one of the largest in India, with 120 million users, 3 million merchants and 300+ billers.
The company has raised over $100M in funding from marquee investors with having 60% ownership under India. The strengths of the payments had aided the company to grow and transform into a full-stack fin-tech platform offering financial products. Working tirelessly since 2018, Mobikwik has reached the feat of disbursing 19 lakh loans via its Digital Credit Line, which discusses money instantly to the user’s wallet. With the acquisition of Mumbai based Clearfunds, the firm had ventured into mutual funds and now they are planning to go public in 2022.
This article is dedicated to all those strong women who have broken the bonds of society that has always considered them inferior and treated them to a lesser extent than they deserve. They have proven their worth and importance to the world by contributing their intelligence and resources to the economic world. They deserve to be appreciated and understood not only once but every day. These women set an incredible example for the whole female kind and motivate them to never stop growing and keep working to reach their goals.
Finally, we are coming to the point where nobody can say that ‘she is a girl, she can’t do it.’ But ‘she is a girl, she can do anything.’
The world is changing and we hope it brings good with it. Women do not want to become superior but just wants to become equal to everyone else in this world. We hope this is useful to you. The order of this list is random.
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