Some of India’s more celebrated
entrepreneurs have yet to reach the richest 100 threshold. Here are five
looming in the wings.
Radhika & Sandeep Aggarwal, 41, 43, returned from Silicon Valley
in 2011 to start an e-commerce venture with a friend to sell low-cost,
unbranded goods to small-town India. Their ShopClues.com achieved unicorn
status after a January funding round valued the online marketplace at $1.1
billion and the couple’s estimated 20% stake at $220 million. Radhika is chief business
officer while Sandeep runs Droom, an online seller of used cars that he founded
two years ago.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, 38, is the founder of fast-growing,
Alibaba- backed mobile wallet Paytm, an acronym for “Pay Through Mobile,” with
139 million users and 3 million transactions daily. Son of a schoolteacher,
Sharma latched on to mobile payments in 2011. A recent funding round by
Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek reportedly values Paytm at $4.8 billion, making
Sharma, with his 21% stake, a billionaire. Sharma is spinning off Paytm’s
e-commerce business into a separate company and will be starting a niche bank.
Devi Prasad Shetty, 63, a U.K.-trained, award-winning
cardiac surgeon who believes in the “Walmartization” of health care, took his
hospital chain Narayana Health public last December. Shares of the
Bangalore-headquartered health care provider are up 29% since. Shetty’s 65% stake,
held together with his wife, is worth more than $600 million. Narayana has 24
hospitals, including one in the Cayman Islands, treating more than
2 million
patients annually.
Bhavish Aggarwal, 31, cofounder and CEO of Ola Cabs,
India’s most popular cab-hailing app with a fleet of 450,000 vehicles in 102
cities. Aggarwal quit Microsoft to start Ola in 2011 with a college pal. The
Uber rival has raised close to $1 billion from investors such as Japan’s
SoftBank and China’s Didi Chuxing. Avid photographer Aggarwal’s estimated 15%
holding is worth $750 million.
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