Startups in India: Meet these women unicorn founders

Let's have a look at the women founders in India’s vaunted unicorn club [Representative image]

Even as the population of unicorns- privately held billion dollar tech companies- has exploded in the last year in India, there hasn’t been a commensurate rise in women founders at these companies. For people in the ecosystem, that’s disappointing but not surprising. Women in technology entrepreneurship have lagged men for a variety of reasons, from biases to societal norms to the ‘dude-bro’ mentality stemming from Silicon Valley culture. While many startups today have more women in their lower and middle rungs, women founders are rarer, although it is slowly changing.

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These are the women founders in India’s vaunted unicorn club-

Rajoshi Ghosh, Co-founder - Hasura: The newest entrant to the unicorn club at the moment, Hasura makes web app development faster. It cuts down the time and expertise required to build GraphQL APIs for data access. Co-founder Ghosh is an alumnus of the National University of Singapore and co-founded 34 Cross, a product development company whose idea sowed the seeds for Hasura.

Smita Deorah, Co-founder and co-CEO - LEAD School: Deorah, a chartered accountant, runs LEAD, a technology platform which schools can use to enhance learning via smart classrooms, certified teachers and international curriculum. Deorah previously worked with Procter and Gamble for over 8 years and has founded Sparsh, a non-profit organisation to help children from low-income communities by running schools in rural areas. Deorah runs LEAD with her husband Sumeet Mehta

Ghazal Alagh, Co-founder - Mamaearth: Ghazal is one half of husband-wife duo Varun and Ghazal Alagh, who run new-age skincare and bodycare brand Mamaearth. Ghazal was also recently a shark/investor on the much-memed and talked-about entrepreneurship show Shark Tank India. Ghazal is known for testing each new Mamaearth product on her before it ships to the public, to check for side effects, etc.

Garima Sawhney, Co-founder - Pristyn Care: Dr. Garima Sawhney co-founded Pristyn Care, a technology platform which utilises additional capacity in hospitals to create multispeciality clinics and surgery centres. Sawhney herself is a doctor from the Maharashtra University of Health Sciences, and was a consultant with Max Super Speciality Hospital and CK Birla Hospital in Gurugram before starting Pristyn, now funded by investors such as Sequoia and Tiger Global.

Ruchi Kalra, Co-founder - OfBusiness: Kalra, an alumnus of IIT-Delhi and the Indian School of Business runs the financing business at OfBusiness, a B2B commerce and lending platform currently valued at $5 billion and looking to go for an IPO this year. She was a partner at management consulting giant McKinsey before co-founding OfBusiness with husband Asish Mohapatra and others.

Upasana Taku, co-founder, Mobikwik: Mobile wallet Mobikwik, which is now a buy-now-pay-later platform was founded by Stanford alum Taku along with her husband Bipin Preet Singh. It managed to survive all these years despite Paytm taking a lead and burning money in most fintech verticals. It became a unicorn leading up to an IPO last year,but had to call off its listing plans post filing documents because of Paytm's spectacular IPO failure. Taku worked with PayPal and HSBC in the US before returning to India to start up

Saritha Katikaneni, Co-founder - Zenoti: Zenoti, a software platform for spas and salons, primarily in the US but later for other countries too, was co-founded by Katikaneni with Sudheer and Dheeraj Koneru and Anand Arvind in 2010. While she is on a personal sabbatical right now according to her LinkedIn, she served as Vice President of Marketing for 9 years in the company.

Falguni Nayar, Co-founder - Nykaa: Nayar has been the face of female entrepreneurship in India the last few years. A former senior banker at Kotak and an alumnus of IIM-Ahmedabad, Nayar started beauty ecommerce platform Nykaa, seen as India’s Sephora in 2012. Raising less equity capital than most other ecommerce companies, she took Nykaa public last year to a valuation of over $10 billion, tripling from months before. While shares have fallen since, Nayar and her family own 50% of Nykaa, and run the company profitably, two features that mark it out from other Indian startups.

Gazal Kalra, Co-founder - Rivigo: Kalra is a co-founder of trucking logistics platform Rivigo, backed by Elevation Capital and Warburg Pincus among others. An alumnus of IIT Delhi, Harvard and Stanford, Kalra worked with McKinsey and was a consultant with the World Bank Group before starting Rivigo. She is now running another stealth mode startup for the last four months, as per her LinkedIn.

Divya Gokulnath, Co-founder - Byju’s: Gokulnath is the wife of Byju Raveendran and co-founder of India’s most valuable internet company, and oversees the content functions at Byju’s and helps curate lectures and teaching styles, as per media reports. Gokulnath was earlier a student of Raveendran as well, when he used to take classes before starting a company.

Radhika Ghai, Co-founder - ShopClues: Ghai was one of India’s first ecommerce entrepreneurs, co-founding online shopping portal ShopClues along with husband Sandeep Aggarwal. She was the Chief Business Officer. ShopClues was one of India’s earliest unicorns, until things unravelled personally and professionally. The couple split up and blamed each other in public with fights over shareholding, control and operations. ShopClues also failed to compete with Flipkart, Amazon or Snapdeal, and was eventually sold in 2019 at a 90% discount to its previous valuation. She is now founder and CEO of Kindlife, a clean beauty and nutrition online brand.

Ambiga Subramanian, co-founder and CEO, MuSigma: Data analytics firm MuSigma was one of India’s first unicorns, with husband-wife founder Dhiraj and Ambiga Rajaram the talk of town and funded by top investors such as Sequoia, General Atlantic and Mastercard. However things changed as the couple split and Ambiga even sold her stake back to her now ex-husband. She then launched a social media platform centred around anonymity, while buyout firms interest in MuSigma was constantly rumoured. However no deal has happened in years.