Beauty
Vineeta Singh turned down a ₹1 crore offer, and built SUGAR Cosmetics
An IIT-IIM graduate and ultramarathoner, Vineeta spent more than a decade building a beauty brand designed specifically for Indian skin.
9 min read
Stories
Every founder story we’ve published.
In-depth founder profiles, each independently researched and sourced only from publicly verifiable information.
Or browse by ranked lists, founder collections and topics.
Category
D2C · Jewellery
Chinu Kala left home at 15 and sold goods door to door, then built a jewellery brand
A childhood exit, years of low-paid selling jobs, and an instinct for retail merchandising came together in Rubans Accessories, her fashion-jewellery company.
7 min read
Fintech
Upasana Taku left PayPal in Silicon Valley to build MobiKwik in Delhi
Fifteen years and one stock market listing later, she is one of the few women founders to have taken an Indian fintech public.
8 min read
Fintech · Inclusion
Sucharita Mukherjee left investment banking to build money rails for India’s informal economy
From structuring debt in London to co-founding Kaleidofin, she has spent her career trying to make finance work for customers banks were never designed to serve.
8 min read
E-commerce
Richa Kar built Zivame to give Indian women a private way to shop lingerie
She turned a quiet, awkward category into a category-defining online brand, now part of the Reliance Retail family.
8 min read
Circular Economy · Plastic Waste Tech
How Meha Lahiri built Recity Network into a bootstrapped circular-economy company
Two decades in marketing, then a career change at 40 into India’s plastic-waste sector with no prior experience, Meha Lahiri co-founded Recity, kept it bootstrapped, and grew it to ~₹22.6 Cr in FY24 across 22+ Indian cities.
10 min read
Health Tech
Meena Ganesh sold an edtech company to Pearson, then built healthcare that comes to your door
A serial entrepreneur who built and exited TutorVista, she co-founded Portea Medical to move Indian healthcare out of the hospital and into the home.
8 min read
Aviation
Kanika Tekriwal beat cancer at 22, then co-founded one of India’s biggest private aviation firms
JetSetGo flies dignitaries, business leaders and sportspeople across India. Kanika and her co-founder Sudheer Perla built it from her recovery and a notebook of operator contacts.
9 min read
Fintech · Asset Mgmt
Radhika Gupta co-founded a quant fund, sold it to Edelweiss, then ran the whole fund house
Rejected by interviewers early in her career, she co-built Forefront Capital Management, saw it acquired by Edelweiss, and became one of the youngest CEOs of an Indian mutual fund.
8 min read
Biotech
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw built Biocon when no Indian bank wanted to lend to a 25-year-old woman
A brewing-trained graduate who could not get hired in 1978 India started a biotech company in a garage in Bengaluru. Today Biocon is one of the country’s largest listed biopharma groups.
11 min read
Wellness
Vandana Luthra built VLCC into India’s biggest wellness chain, and sold a majority stake to Carlyle 34 years in
Started in 1989 as a single beauty and slimming centre in Safdarjung Development Area, VLCC grew into a multi-country wellness group; in January 2023, the Carlyle Group acquired a majority stake from the Luthra family in a deal widely reported at around US$300 million.
9 min read
Edtech
Aditi Gupta turned a design-school thesis into a comic book that teaches girls about periods in 22+ countries
A 2012 graduation project at NID Ahmedabad’s New Media Design programme became Menstrupedia, the colourful, classroom-friendly comic book that demystifies menstruation for schoolgirls in India and beyond.
8 min read
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