Stories
In-depth founder profiles, each independently researched and sourced only from publicly verifiable information.
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Diagnosed with PCOS as a teenager, she taught herself plant-based baking, started a home bakery with ₹50,000 of personal savings, and grew it into a Shark Tank-backed D2C brand reporting ~₹10.8 Cr revenue by FY24–25.
She and her classmates cleared months of garbage from a drain near her engineering college in 2016. The trash came back the next day. The TrashBot, a fully automated waste-segregation machine, is what she built in response.
She started by looking at Indian pet care end-to-end, vet consults, clinics, food, wellness products, and built Wiggles as one platform rather than a single product, then funded it through India’s most experienced consumer investors.
After more than a decade in brand marketing, a change in her health and becoming a mother led Kiran Khatanhar to begin again. KKATHA Accessories, the bootstrapped, handcrafted-jewellery label she founded in Mumbai in late 2024, reached the Cannes Film Festival red carpet less than two years later.
After building an ethnic-wear D2C business, she co-founded Palmonas with her husband to do for diamond jewellery what D2C has done for skincare, clear pricing, modern brand, scientifically real stones.
She left an engineering track to build a clean-beauty brand from Kolkata that takes Ayurveda seriously as ingredient science, not as nostalgia, and won an on-air Shark Tank India deal making the case.
She left a global beauty career to start a clinically-led, science-forward skincare brand priced for Indian skin and Indian wallets, and built one of the breakout D2C beauty companies of the last few years.
IIM Bangalore. President of the Jagran Group. CEO of Music Broadcast, the company behind Radio City. Author of two books about women at work. Then she co-founded Aazol Ventures, a D2C brand for traditional Maharashtrian foods.
Before 2006, Indian angel investing was a private set of phone calls between a handful of senior operators. The Indian Angel Network turned it into a formal platform, with diligence, governance and a national chapter network.
Married off at twelve, attempted suicide as a teenager, started over in a Mumbai chawl, and decades later took control of a defunct ninety-year-old metal-tubes company and brought it back to life.
Carnegie Mellon graduate, third-generation auto entrepreneur, and the Indian industrialist who turned the Kinetic name into one of the early branded players in electric three-wheelers and small two-wheelers.
A PhD computer scientist who spent two decades at TCS and HP Labs walked out at 47 to co-found a Bengaluru company combining thermal imaging and machine learning into a portable, radiation-free breast-cancer screening device.
