How Apurva Purohit walked out of running one of India’s largest media groups, and started a Maharashtrian foods brand at 57

Most senior women in Indian corporate life retire into board roles, mentorship and the occasional newspaper column. Apurva Purohit, by 2021, was on every list of candidates for exactly that kind of soft landing: an IIM Bangalore graduate, the long-time CEO of Music Broadcast (the parent of Radio City), and later President of the Jagran Group, one of India’s largest media houses. She also had two well-reviewed books on women and work, Lady, You’re Not a Man! and Lady, You’re the Boss!, that had given her a national speaking platform.

Instead, in 2022, she co-founded Aazol Ventures, a Pune-based D2C food company that sells traditional Maharashtrian preparations, thecha, papads, sweets, snacks, condiments, sourced from women self-help groups across rural Maharashtra. The reframe matters: this is not a celebrity-CEO vanity project, it is an attempt to build a packaged-foods company with a defensible sourcing model in one of the hardest categories in Indian D2C.

Early life

Apurva Purohit grew up in a household where, in her own words, her parents raised her without the gendered shrinking that most Indian girls of her generation absorbed by default. That detail is not biography for its own sake; it is the lived foundation of the books she would later write, which argue that the early conditioning a woman receives determines more of her professional life than any individual workplace decision. The family is Maharashtrian, which becomes important again four decades later when Aazol’s product line is anchored in Maharashtrian regional foods.

Education

Purohit holds a postgraduate management degree from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB). That is the single most-cited credential in her professional biography and the one that put her on a fast track in Indian media in the 1990s, at a moment when an IIM-trained operator inside a fast-growing media company was a structurally rare combination.

Career before Aazol

Purohit’s pre-Aazol career covers almost three decades inside Indian media and entertainment. Across that time she held several senior leadership roles, the best-known of which are:

• CEO, Music Broadcast Limited (Radio City), she ran one of India’s leading FM-radio networks through its critical scaling years, including the transition from a single-city brand to a multi-city national network.
• President, Jagran Prakashan / Jagran Group, one of India’s largest print media groups (parent of the Hindi daily Dainik Jagran and a portfolio of radio, magazines and digital properties); Purohit served as Group President.
• Earlier senior roles included leadership positions at Zee Entertainment and other Indian media businesses.

Through this period she also became one of the most publicly identifiable women CEOs in Indian media, repeatedly profiled in Forbes Asia, Business Today and other mainstream business press, and serving on multiple corporate boards.

The books

Two books published in this period belong inside the founder story, not outside it. Lady, You’re Not a Man!, The Adventures of a Woman at Work (2013) and Lady, You’re the Boss! (2019) made Purohit one of the few Indian women CEOs who spoke publicly and at length about the structural mechanics of how women succeed inside corporate India, the conditioning, the negotiation behaviour, the operational rules of thumb. They are not memoirs and not motivational essays; they are operating manuals from someone who had run two large businesses. The platform these books built, speaking, op-eds, podcasts, is part of why the eventual founder pivot at 57 had a ready audience.

Why she co-founded Aazol

The thesis behind Aazol is specific. Traditional Maharashtrian foods, thecha, masale, chutneys, sweets, snacks, are made at scale and to high quality by women self-help groups across rural Maharashtra, but those groups have almost no national distribution or branded packaging; they sell into local markets at low realised prices. National D2C food brands, on the other hand, almost all sell aspirational global formats, granola, kombucha, protein bars, into urban metros. The middle of the market, regional Indian foods sourced from women’s collectives, packaged to FSSAI standards and shipped through e-commerce, was structurally underserved. Purohit and her co-founder set out to build into that gap.

The brand was incorporated in Pune in 2022 under Aazol Ventures. Its sourcing model is the asset: long-running relationships with women self-help groups in rural Maharashtra, with Aazol providing standardisation, quality control, packaging, marketing and a distribution path through its own website, e-commerce marketplaces and selected retail. Profit share with the groups is built into the model, not bolted on as CSR.

The early struggle

Indian D2C food is one of the unforgiving startup categories: thin margins, complex cold-chain and shelf-life economics, fragmented logistics, FSSAI and labelling compliance, and CAC that almost always exceeds first-order contribution. Aazol’s additional layer of difficulty is the sourcing model itself: working with rural self-help groups requires the company to actively build production capacity and quality systems, rather than just placing orders with an existing branded supplier. None of these are unsolvable problems, but together they make the early years of an Indian regional-foods brand a slow grind. The company is still in the build phase and has not raised the kind of headline cheques that consumer-tech D2C brands attract.

Funding & revenue

Aazol Ventures is a privately held early-stage company. Public coverage to date describes it as bootstrapped and angel-backed rather than venture-funded at scale, with Purohit and her co-founder providing initial capital and ecosystem investors layering in. Specific revenue numbers are not consistently disclosed and would be premature to assert; the durable, verifiable facts are the brand’s active product line, its sourcing relationships with women self-help groups in rural Maharashtra, and its founders’ documented public profile and operating history.

Apurva Purohit’s net worth & ownership

There is no reliable, publicly disclosed net-worth figure for Apurva Purohit. Her wealth is built across decades of senior executive compensation at large media companies, board positions, book royalties, and her stake in Aazol Ventures; almost none of this is on a public-market ticker. Estimator-site figures are speculative and not repeated here.

Apurva Purohit milestones timeline

• 1990s–2000s, Builds a career in Indian media including senior roles at Zee Entertainment and other media companies after her IIM Bangalore MBA.
• 2005–2014, Serves as CEO of Music Broadcast Limited, leading Radio City through its multi-city scaling phase.
• 2013, Publishes Lady, You’re Not a Man!, her first book on women at work in India.
• 2014–2021, Serves as President of the Jagran Group, including responsibilities across the group’s print, radio and digital businesses.
• 2019, Publishes her second book, Lady, You’re the Boss!.
• 2022, Co-founds Aazol Ventures in Pune, a D2C brand for traditional Maharashtrian foods sourced from rural women’s self-help groups.
• 2023–present, Builds Aazol’s product range and distribution while continuing public-speaking and advisory work.

Aazol business model

Aazol’s business model is a vertically integrated regional-foods brand: source from women self-help groups in rural Maharashtra, standardise production and packaging at Aazol’s level, and sell through a mix of its own D2C website, major Indian e-commerce marketplaces and selected modern-trade retail. The unit economics depend on three levers: sourcing cost, packaging and logistics cost, and customer acquisition. The structural advantage Aazol is reaching for is differentiation rather than discount, products that have no real branded substitute on a typical Indian D2C shelf, which, if it works, supports a higher gross margin than commoditised snack categories.

Aazol competitors

The honest competitive set is not other regional-foods D2C brands, there are very few at any scale, but the broader Indian packaged-foods shelf: legacy regional brands with strong local franchises, large pan-India FMCG companies extending into snacks and condiments, and a long tail of unbranded regional producers selling through general trade. Aazol’s position relative to all three is the same: a brand with a sourcing story and product authenticity that legacy national FMCG cannot replicate, addressed at the slice of the Indian consumer who wants regional food with consistent packaging and online delivery.

Growth strategy

Three deliberate choices define the build. First, anchor the brand in a sharply specific regional cuisine rather than competing for the generic Indian-foods consumer, Maharashtrian foods give Aazol a defensible identity. Second, treat the sourcing relationship with women self-help groups as a structural advantage and not as a CSR talking point; the durability of those relationships is the moat. Third, grow gross margin before scaling marketing, the temptation in Indian D2C is to outspend on customer acquisition before the product economics are tuned, and Purohit’s public statements about the company suggest a more patient build.

What Apurva Purohit’s story teaches Indian founders

Two lessons travel forward. First, a long operator career inside large businesses is not the opposite of an entrepreneurial career, it is the most underrated form of founder preparation, because the operator has seen, at scale, every part of the system the new founder is about to encounter. Second, the right brand thesis in Indian D2C food is regional specificity, not global pastiche; the unmet demand is for products that have no national branded substitute, and the founders most likely to build them are the ones who can credibly hold a sourcing relationship that incumbent FMCG companies cannot easily replicate.

Sources & verification

This profile is anchored only in publicly verifiable facts. Key claims are supported by:

• Apurva Purohit co-founded Aazol Ventures in 2022 in Pune, Founder interviews and consistent Indian business-press coverage (Forbes India, The Economic Times, YourStory, Mint).
• Career as CEO of Music Broadcast (Radio City) and President of the Jagran Group, Public corporate disclosures of those entities and contemporaneous business-press reporting.
• IIM Bangalore postgraduate management degree, Repeatedly cited across independent profile features and her own published author biographies.
• Books Lady, You’re Not a Man! (2013) and Lady, You’re the Boss! (2019), Publisher records and contemporaneous reviews in mainstream Indian press.

Frequently asked questions about Apurva Purohit and Aazol Ventures

Who is Apurva Purohit?

Apurva Purohit is an Indian business leader and author who co-founded Aazol Ventures in 2022. Before Aazol she served as President of the Jagran Group and as CEO of Music Broadcast (Radio City), and held earlier senior roles in Indian media. She is also the author of two books on women at work in India.

What is Aazol Ventures and what does it sell?

Aazol Ventures is a Pune-based D2C foods company that sells traditional Maharashtrian preparations, thecha, masale, condiments, sweets and snacks, sourced from women’s self-help groups in rural Maharashtra and packaged to national standards. Distribution runs through Aazol’s own website, large Indian e-commerce marketplaces and selected retail partners.

Which books has Apurva Purohit written?

Apurva Purohit has written Lady, You’re Not a Man!, The Adventures of a Woman at Work (2013) and Lady, You’re the Boss! (2019). Both deal with the structural mechanics of how women navigate Indian corporate life and are written from her perspective as a long-running CEO in Indian media.

What is Apurva Purohit’s net worth?

There is no reliable, publicly disclosed net-worth figure for Apurva Purohit. Her wealth has been built across decades of senior executive compensation, board positions, book royalties and her stake in Aazol Ventures, almost none of which is on a public-market ticker, so estimator-site figures are speculative and not repeated here.

What can founders learn from Aazol?

That a long, senior operating career inside large businesses can be excellent founder preparation, and that the most defensible thesis in Indian D2C food is regional specificity backed by a real sourcing relationship, not aspirational global formats.

More founder journeys: women building Indian D2C brands · women founders in Pune · women founders in food.