Over the years, there have been many entrepreneurs in India. The likes of Dhirubhai Ambani, Jamsetji Tata, Verghese Kurien, Azim Premji, Lakshmi Mittal, Anand Mahindra, the Godrej family, the Bajaj family, Kumar Mangalam Birla, and Jagdish Chandra Mahindra are some names that immediately come to mind. These legendary individuals have been able to overcome all the obstacles put in their way and charted their own course and forged their empires for posterity. Several Indians have also been making their presence felt in countries like the US and the UK. However, the ones who really stand out are ones who are carrying the same torch of entrepreneurship in India. Considering how India is supposed to develop into a global power of considerable economic repute in the days ahead their contribution is going to be quite significant indeed.
Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal
In many ways the Bansals – Sachin and Binny – can be credited for changing the way Indians shop these days for having started Flipkart in 2007. The software engineers came together at Amazon.com in 2006. They worked together for a period of half a year following which they decided to leave the organization and start their own company. In the beginning they decided to start off with a comparison-based search engine but soon understood that the market for e-commerce was rather limited. This is why they decided to launch Flipkart. They started with a modest amount of capital and an office at Bengaluru from where they would personally deliver the ordered goods. Soon they also started to interact with buyers so as to get a first-hand idea of what they wanted and the results are now for everyone to see.
Trishneet Arora
Trishneet Arora is one of the top experts and authors in India on cyber security apart from being an entrepreneur. Arora has founded TAC Security Solutions that deals in specialized services such as penetration testing and vulnerability assessment. It also deals with data theft. Arora believes that these days hackers are breaking into company portals at an increasing rate in an order to steal critical information and this is a major issue for companies since it severely tests their capability to sustain themselves over the long term. This is where TAC plays such a major role in attempting to safeguard its clients against such malpractices. TAC serves a wide array of clients such as Reliance Industries, Punjab Police, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), and Gujarat Police.
Naveen Tewari
One of the leading young entrepreneurs of India, Naveen Tewari has founded InMobi, a company that deals in mobile technology and advertising around the world. Tewari is also one of the board members at Paytm, one of the top online wallets being used in India. It was while studying for his BSc in mechanical engineering at IIT Kanpur that Tewari met Abhay Singhal and Amit Gupta. These three would later on be joined by Mohit Saxena and they would then go on to form InMobi. Their journeys as entrepreneurs started in 2007 from an apartment they shared in Mumbai. They were known as ‘boys with powerpoint’ and their first company was mKhoj, a search engine for SMSs. Even though their business tanked in a short while they were undaunted and found InMobi. Soon, they shifted base to Bengaluru so that they could get the best of technology and talent over there. Their major investors are Sherpalo, KPCB, and SoftBank.
Varun Agarwal
Varun Agarwal founded Alma Mater along with Rohn Malhotra, a friend, in 2009 after he dropped out of his Bachelor of Engineering (BE) programme on telecommunication because he was not sufficiently interested in the same. His company made customized sweatshirts for alumnus of various educational institutions across the country. Right now it is the biggest company in India in this domain and caters to schools as well. He has also founded LMF, a company that deals in producing music videos, ad films, and corporate films. This endeavour has brought him critical acclaim as well as commercial success with an unprecedented amount of hits on YouTube.
Ritesh Agarwal
The 23-year-old Ritesh Agarwal has founded OYO Rooms, one of the leading aggregators of budget hotel rooms in India. Agarwal’s journey as an entrepreneur started when he was merely 17-years-old. Apart from his credentials as an entrepreneur Agarwal also happens to be the first Indian to have won the Thiel Fellowship. Agarwal has stated time and again that the main reason behind him opening his startup is to help people find proper facilities within a decent budget. He wants to bridge the trust gap that he feels most people, who book such rooms on internet, face when they eventually visit the rooms that they have booked online.
