Results (775 found)

WomenMay 24, 2026

The Engineer Who Was Told to "Stay in the Kitchen": How Vimala Raju Built a ₹200 Crore Electronics Empire by Refusing to Listen

In 1995, Vimala Raju walked into a bank in Hyderabad to apply for a loan. She was 24 years old, had a degree in electrical engineering from Osmania University, and carried a business plan for a company that would manufacture industrial power supplies—the unsung components that convert electricity into the precise voltages required by everything from factory machinery to medical equipment. The loan officer looked at her, looked at the application, and asked a question she has never forgotten. "Why don't you just stay in the kitchen?"

WomenMay 24, 2026

She Poured ₹5 Lakh Into a Bottle of Onion Oil. Today, She Runs a ₹150 Crore Vegan Beauty Empire—Without a Single Rupee of Venture Capital.

Rupali Sharma was not supposed to be a beauty mogul. She was a mother, recovering from childbirth, watching clumps of her hair fall out in the shower and feeling, as millions of women before her have felt, that her body was betraying her in ways no one had warned her about. She tried the conventional remedies. They failed. In desperation, she turned to the one person whose advice had never let her down: her grandmother, who told her to apply onion extract to her scalp.

WomenMay 24, 2026

She Was Sleeping on the Floor Nine Months Ago. Today, the 23-Year-Old Who Pitched a Silicon Valley Titan for 20 Minutes Just Doubled Her Startup's Valuation to $200 Million.

In February, Anjali Sardana flew to San Francisco with a backpack and a pitch. She was 23 years old, had been running a company for roughly eight months, and had secured a twenty-minute meeting with Lachy Groom, one of Silicon Valley's most closely watched solo investors, through a mutual connection. Groom had backed Stripe, Figma, and Zepto. He co-founded Physical Intelligence, the robotics startup valued in the billions. He did not take meetings with just anyone. Sardana had prepared intensively, the way a former Bain Capital analyst prepares for anything — thoroughly, methodically, leaving nothing to chance.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The Ex-Banker Who Was Told She Didn't Look Like a Founder: How Romita Mazumdar Built a ₹650 Crore Skincare Challenger in Four Years—and Just Won Over a Japanese Beauty Giant

Before she built one of India's fastest-growing skincare brands, before she raised $30 million from a 80-year-old Japanese cosmetics conglomerate, before she stood on stage at retail conferences and was introduced as a founder to watch, Romita Mazumdar was asked a question she still remembers. She was at a team dinner, early in her career, surrounded by colleagues from the venture capital firm where she worked. Someone looked at her across the table and asked, in the casual, unthinking way that such questions are asked, whether she was an intern.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The Kerala Lab That Taught an AI to Read the Brain—And Is Now Helping Surgeons Navigate Its Most Dangerous Territory

Dr. Laina Emmanuel was not supposed to be a neurotech entrepreneur. She was a clinical neuropsychologist, the kind who spends her days in hospital wards, assessing patients with brain tumours, traumatic brain injuries, and neurodegenerative diseases. She watched neurosurgeons plan their operations by staring at black-and-white MRI slices, mentally reconstructing the three-dimensional architecture of the brain, and making their best guess about where the tumour ended and the healthy tissue began. She watched them get it wrong—not often, but often enough. A few millimetres in the wrong direction, and a patient who came in for a tumour resection left the operating theatre unable to speak, or walk, or recognise their spouse.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The ₹60 Crore Bet That India's Water Crisis Can Be Solved by IoT: How a Pune Engineer Built the World's Largest Smart Water Meter Network—and Is Taking It to 40 Countries

Sometime in 2014, Vivek Shukla was sitting in a government office in Maharashtra, watching a junior engineer manually transcribe water meter readings from a crumpled paper ledger into a desktop computer. The meter reader had visited roughly 40 households that morning, squinting at analogue dials, scribbling numbers on a clipboard, and moving on. By the time the data reached the central database — assuming it ever did — it would be weeks out of date, riddled with errors, and functionally useless for the one thing it was supposed to enable: billing people for the water they actually used. Shukla, an instrumentation engineer who had spent years building industrial sensors for factories, looked at the ledger and saw something different. He saw a market failure.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The ₹1,150 Crore Startup That India's Venture Capitalists Forgot to Notice: How Three IIT Friends Spent 16 Years Building a Profitable Climate-Tech Giant While Everyone Chased Quick Commerce

In 2010, three friends from IIT Kharagpur stood at the threshold of a decision that would define the rest of their lives. Devendra Gupta had a job offer from a multinational corporation. Prateek Singhal had an offer from a prestigious foreign university. Vivek Pandey had a path that looked, to everyone who knew him, like the safe, sensible, upward trajectory of an engineering graduate from one of India's finest institutions. The offers were good. The paths were clear. The alternative was to start a company that made solar-powered pumps for farmers—a category that did not exist, in a market that had never heard of it, with no venture capital, no government incentives, and no guarantee that anyone would buy what they built.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The Gurugram Startup That Said Even Air Conditioners Deserve an Indian Engineering Upgrade

Ashish Goel was not supposed to be a hardware entrepreneur. He had spent the better part of his career building software — the kind that makes e-commerce platforms run faster, that optimises supply chains, that sits invisibly inside the digital infrastructure of modern India. He was good at it. He was comfortable. And then, in the brutal summer of 2024, his air conditioner broke.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The Farm Boy and the IIT Engineer Who Turned Crop Smoke into a ₹120 Crore Carbon Empire

The autumn of 2022 was the year the air in Delhi became a crime scene. For weeks, a thick grey pall of smoke from burning rice stubble in Punjab and Haryana settled over the National Capital Region, pushing the Air Quality Index past 400—"severe," the colour code for a public health emergency. Schools closed. Flights were grounded. The Supreme Court summoned government officials and demanded answers. The chief ministers of the agrarian states pointed at helpless farmers who had no choice but to clear their fields for the next planting season. The farmers pointed at the government, which had promised them affordable alternatives and delivered none. The smoke, season after season, was nobody's fault and everybody's problem.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The Bengaluru Lab That Taught an AI to Read the Brain—And Is Now Helping Surgeons Navigate Its Most Dangerous Territory

Dr. Laina Emmanuel was not supposed to be a neurotech entrepreneur. She was a clinical neuropsychologist, the kind who spends her days in hospital wards, assessing patients with brain tumours, traumatic brain injuries, and neurodegenerative diseases. She watched neurosurgeons plan their operations by staring at black-and-white MRI slices, mentally reconstructing the three-dimensional architecture of the brain, and making their best guess about where the tumour ended and the healthy tissue began. She watched them get it wrong—not often, but often enough. A few millimetres in the wrong direction, and a patient who came in for a tumour resection left the operating theatre unable to speak, or walk, or recognise their spouse.