Stories
In-depth founder profiles, each independently researched and sourced only from publicly verifiable information.
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Millions finish degrees every year and a large share are judged unready for the jobs they trained for. Careerpedia works in that gap, with project-based training and employers attached at the other end.
Hormonal conditions are widespread among Indian women and are usually caught years after they start. LAIQA answers them in the place women already spend their day, which is a WhatsApp chat.
Hidden hunger is eating enough and still being deficient in iron and zinc. Rather than selling supplements, Better Nutrition puts the nutrients into the staples that are already in every kitchen.
Roughly three in four Indian women have brown to deep brown skin, and the counters were stocked for the rest. She left consulting in San Francisco to build the brand that stopped pretending otherwise.
She spent more than 15 years scaling industrial biotechnology in the United States, then came home to Bengaluru to build something harder. String Bio feeds methane to microbes and turns it into animal feed and crop nutrition.
She was pulled out of school in class 8 and married at 17. She began with ten women, a hundred rupees each and a second-hand sewing machine. Today the embroidery of Barmer feeds tens of thousands of households, and Harvard has asked her to explain how.
She and her husband started Juicy Chemistry in a Coimbatore kitchen with 5,000 rupees, after a family business collapsed. It became India’s first certified organic beauty brand and raised a 6.3 million dollar round led by Verlinvest.
She spent a decade building other companies’ brands, then quit to sell Indian parents something the whole country had been taught to throw away: a cloth diaper. SuperBottoms grew to ₹84 crore and drew Alia Bhatt as an investor.
She left an AVP seat at Swiggy to teach children music and public speaking over video calls. When Indian edtech imploded, Spark Studio had raised barely $1.9 million, stayed lean, and lived to become an AI company.
Drone batteries have a habit of swelling, overheating and, every so often, catching fire mid-flight. Kajal Shah left a career in aviation R&D to build one that doesn’t. Her company, Dreamfly Innovations, now sells non-flammable graphene cells to Tata Advanced Systems and L&T, and has raised close to $1.7 million to make more of them.
After years in Mumbai’s corporate world, Sujata Goswami and her sister built YOBO Collective as an interdisciplinary arts and culture platform where artists from Assam and the wider Northeast can create, collaborate, and feel a sense of belonging.
When the pandemic pushed India onto its phone to pay for everything, Akkineni Keerthi saw what millions only felt, that digital payments had become essential, and were still nowhere near simple enough. The company she co-founded in answer, innopay, now carries more than 30 financial services, a crore-plus downloads and over ₹1,600 crore in transactions. She built all of it without taking a rupee of outside money.
