Results (724 found)

StartupsJun 8, 2026

Sanjeev Bikhchandani — The Man Who Bet His Savings on a Job Portal When India Had No Internet Jobs

In 1995, Sanjeev Bikhchandani was a 32-year-old marketing professional with a steady job. He and his wife invested their life savings — ₹8 lakh — to start a small business in his father's backyard shed. Their idea: a job portal called Naukri.com. The problem? India had barely 10,000 internet connections, and almost no one looked for jobs online. Everyone said he was crazy. But Sanjeev believed that the internet would change everything. Today, Naukri.com is India’s largest online job portal, with over 70 million registered users and 150,000+ recruiter clients. His company, InfoEdge, is a $10 billion publicly traded giant that has also funded successful startups like Zomato, PolicyBazaar, and Swiggy. This article traces Sanjeev's journey from a backyard startup to a pioneer of Indian internet, and from a job portal founder to one of India’s most respected angel investors.

WomenJun 8, 2026

Type Beauty's Ananya Kapur and the Women Founders Who Are Rewriting What Beauty — and Business — Means in India

A new generation of women-led beauty brands is dismantling decades of colonial beauty standards and building in their place something more honest, more inclusive, and more commercially powerful. We examine the founders leading this cultural and economic revolution.

StartupsJun 8, 2026

Mukesh Bansal — The Engineer Who Sold T-Shirts Online and Then Built India’s Largest Health & Fitness Platform

In 2007, Mukesh Bansal was a software engineer in the US, earning a comfortable salary. He wanted to return to India but didn’t know what to do. He noticed that Indians were becoming more fashion-conscious, but online shopping for clothes was almost non-existent. So he founded Myntra, an online personalized gift store that pivoted to fashion e-commerce. He grew Myntra into a $300 million business before selling it to Flipkart. Then he started Cure.fit (now Cure.Fit), a health and fitness platform that combines gyms, yoga, mental wellness, and healthy food delivery. This article traces Mukesh’s journey from a BITS Pilani engineer to a serial entrepreneur who built two category-defining companies. We analyze his “pivot or die” philosophy, his obsession with customer experience, and his ability to spot trends before they become mainstream.

WomenJun 8, 2026

A Decade of Startup India: Why the Most Important Chapter Has Always Been the Women Writing It

National Startup Day 2026 marks ten years of the Startup India initiative — a decade that has produced 207,000 startups, 132 unicorns, and a cultural transformation in what Indian entrepreneurship means. But its most consequential and least fully recognized achievement may be the growing leadership of women founders. We examine the decade's women-led revolution.

WomenJun 8, 2026

Over a Million Strong: The Story Behind India's 1.02 Lakh Women-Led Startups

When more than half of India's recognized startups have at least one woman director, it is no longer a diversity story. It is the mainstream story of Indian entrepreneurship. We trace how this transformation happened — and what it means for the economy, the culture, and the next generation of Indian founders.

StartupsJun 8, 2026

Byju Raveendran — The Teacher Who Stuttered, Built a $22 Billion Edtech Giant, and Then Faced the Fall

: Byju Raveendran could not speak fluently as a child. He stammered, was laughed at in class, and was told he would never be a good teacher. He taught himself techniques to overcome his stutter, discovered a love for mathematics, and started teaching friends in a small room in Chennai. That side hustle became Byju's – India's most valuable edtech startup, once valued at $22 billion, with over 150 million users. Then the pandemic boom turned into a post-pandemic bust. Byju's faced a liquidity crisis, layoffs, and a dramatic fall from grace. This article traces Byju's journey from a passionate teacher to a billionaire founder, and then through the challenges of hyper-growth, aggressive acquisitions, and debt. It's a story of ambition, vision, and the brutal reality of startup economics.

StartupsJun 8, 2026

Sanjiv Bajaj — The Man Who Demystified Financial Services for Middle-Class India

In 2007, Sanjiv Bajaj was given a challenge by his father, Rahul Bajaj: take a small, struggling division of Bajaj Auto and turn it into a financial services powerhouse. Sanjiv had no banking background. He was an engineer from India and a management graduate from the US. But he understood the middle-class Indian — someone who needed loans for a scooter, insurance for the family, and a credit card without hidden fees. He built Bajaj Finserv into a $50 billion conglomerate, with subsidiaries like Bajaj Finance (one of India’s most profitable lenders) and Bajaj Allianz. This article traces Sanjiv’s journey from a reluctant heir to a fintech pioneer. We analyze his “customer obsession” model, his bet on small-ticket loans, and his ability to out-innovate both traditional banks and new-age startups.

StartupsJun 8, 2026

Ashish Hemrajani — The Man Who Made India Book Tickets Online When Nobody Believed in the Internet

Excerpt: In 1999, Ashish Hemrajani was a young entrepreneur trying to sell movie tickets online. India had barely 1 million internet users, and most people had never used a credit card. He was called crazy, foolish, and ahead of his time. But he persisted. Today, BookMyShow is India’s largest online ticketing platform, selling over 500 million tickets annually for movies, sports, live events, and concerts. This article traces Ashish’s two-decade journey from a small Mumbai office to a company valued at over $2 billion. We analyze how he survived the dot-com crash, the shift to mobile, and the pandemic near-death experience. His story is about patience, adaptation, and believing in a future that nobody else could see.

StartupsJun 8, 2026

Shradha Sharma — From a Blogger to India's Largest Startup Media Platform

: In 2008, Shradha Sharma was a journalist at CNBC TV18, tired of covering the same big corporate news. She wanted to tell the stories of small entrepreneurs — the people building India’s future but ignored by mainstream media. So she started a simple blog called YourStory. Today, YourStory reaches over 30 million readers a month, has published 100,000+ startup stories, and has become the voice of Indian entrepreneurship. This article traces Shradha’s journey from a single-woman media startup to a profitable digital platform that has covered unicorns like Flipkart, Ola, and Zomato before they were famous. We analyze her unique “storytelling first” model, her refusal to chase clickbait, and her impact on India’s startup ecosystem.

WomenJun 8, 2026

Record VC Funding for Women-Led Startups in 2026 Is Not a Diversity Statistic — It Is a Market Correction

For the first time in India's startup history, women-led ventures are attracting capital not as a social good investment but as a hard commercial bet. Behind this shift is accumulating evidence that the market has been systematically mispricing the best female-led opportunities — and sophisticated investors are now correcting that mispricing.