Ronnie Screwvala

About Ronnie Screwvala

Ronnie Screwvala's first business made toothbrushes. He was born Rohinton Soli Screwvala in Bombay on 8 September 1956, into a Parsi family; his father was an executive at the British firms J. L. Morrison and Smith & Nephew. He went to the Cathedral and John Connon School and Sydenham College, both in Mumbai, and started out in the early 1980s doing whatever looked like an opening — which at that point meant manufacturing toothbrushes. What he is actually remembered for is cable television. He was among the first people in India to build it as a business, and he turned that into UTV Software Communications — a media and entertainment group that ended up partnering with News Corp, 20th Century Fox, Bloomberg and eventually The Walt Disney Company. In 2012 he sold UTV to Disney at an enterprise value of about $1.4 billion. The company is now Walt Disney India. He did not stop there, which is the more interesting half. From 2013 he and his wife Zarina Mehta — a UTV co-founder herself — scaled the Swades Foundation, whose stated model is to work with a million people in rural India, lift them out of poverty over six to seven years, and then move to a new geography and do it again. He co-founded upGrad, the online higher-education company. He founded U Sports, which runs teams across kabaddi, football and e-sports, including U Mumba in the Pro Kabaddi League. Through Unilazer Ventures he has been an active private-equity and early-stage investor in Indian startups, and he has since committed a personal $50 million fund to early-stage AI, deeptech and space-tech companies. And he went back to films. RSVP Movies, the production company he founded after the Disney sale, develops original scripts with a rotating set of directors. Esquire named him one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century in 2008; he was ranked 78th on the Time 100, and listed by Fortune among Asia's 25 most powerful people. He lives in Breach Candy in south Mumbai. His daughter Trishya, from his first marriage, runs a non-profit of her own called The Lighthouse Project. Sources: English Wikipedia (biography, UTV and the Disney sale, current ventures and recognitions, accessed August 2026); rsvpmovies.in and upgrad.com. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Basic Information

Founder, RSVP Movies and Unilazer Ventures; Co-founder, upGrad and U Sports; Co-trustee, Swades Foundation

Company Details

RSVP Movies / Unilazer Ventures

Media and entertainment, online education, sports and early-stage investing

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