Founders, CEOs, and entrepreneurs.
He started with a toothbrush factory, pioneered cable television in India, built UTV into a media group he sold to Disney for $1.4 billion — and then went and built an edtech company, a sports league and a film studio.
He co-founded Infosys in 1981, ran it as CEO while revenue grew sixfold, then left in 2009 to build an identity system for a billion people. In 2026 the government asked him to fix India's exams.
For three years he traded shares by day and worked night shifts at a call centre to fund it. The brokerage he later built with his brother took no outside money at all — and now does ₹8,847 crore a year, wholly owned by the family.
A bad experience with a matrimonial consultant in 1997 turned into Sagai.com, then Shaadi.com. Twenty-eight years later he has backed over 250 startups, chaired India's internet industry body, and acted in two Bollywood films.
He quit Microsoft, came home, and registered a company in his parents' house in Greater Kailash. Three of its four websites were shut down. The fourth was Lenskart, which listed in 2025 raising over ₹7,200 crore.
Her father started Emcure in 1981 with a ₹3 lakh bank loan. She qualified as a chartered accountant, took an MBA at Duke, worked in American medtech — then came home as CFO and is now Executive Director of a listed pharma company doing ₹7,963 crore a year.
He started in a call centre, trading equities on the side. Twenty years on he co-owns Zerodha, runs an asset manager and a venture fund, hosts a podcast that has had Modi, Bill Gates and Elon Musk on it — and has pledged away half his wealth.
Founder and Executive Chairperson of Biocon — India's first biotech company, started in a Bengaluru garage in 1978 and now a multi-billion-dollar global biopharmaceutical group. India's only self-made woman billionaire.
