Daring to Dream

India’s young wealth creators—founders, innovators, investors, and disruptors under 35—are reimagining enterprise. From fintech and edtech to fashion, AI and retail, they have turned lockdown ideas into billion-dollar unicorns, heritage crafts into global brands, and technology into mass opportunity. Their wealth is measured not just in valuations but in the power to change how a country lives, works, and spends. In their ambition, they embody a new generation of Indian capitalism.

 Aravind Srinivas, 31, founder and CEO, Perplexity

 AT 31, ARAVIND SRINIVAS is already an unlikely mogul. His fortune is measured in tens of thousands of crores, his company is taking on Google at its own game, and yet he carries the air of the South Indian engineering student trying to coax meaning out of algorithms. He grew up in Chennai, went through the brutal filters of IIT Madras, and then crossed continents to Berkeley, where his research on language models drew him into the orbit of OpenAI. From there the leap to entrepreneurship seemed inevitable. In 2022, with three colleagues, he founded Perplexity, an AI-driven search engine that tries to answer questions the way a thoughtful teacher would, directly and with references in hand.

The idea sounds simple now. At the time it was almost quixotic. Why take on search, the most fortified territory of the internet, the province of trillion-dollar companies? Srinivas’ conviction came from frustration. Search, he believed, had lost its way. What was once the gateway to knowledge had become a hall of mirrors: ads crowding the top, websites gaming the system with keywords, users clicking through pages of detritus to find clean facts. He wanted something stripped down, a tool that could listen to a question and answer with clarity, and then point you to where it found the answer.

Perplexity’s timing was uncanny. ChatGPT had just turned AI into a global spectacle. Perplexity arrived with a counter-move: conversational answers tied to sources you could verify. It was less glamorous than a chatbot that could write a sonnet, but it felt more useful. Within a year, Jeff Bezos and Nvidia were on the cap table. By mid-2025, Perplexity was valued at about $18 billion, with later funding rounds pushing the number close to $20 billion.

The speed of it all is still staggering. Srinivas, who only a few years ago was writing research papers at Berkeley, now finds himself with an estimated net worth of around ₹21,000 crore. It is tempting to slot Srinivas into familiar archetypes—the whiz-kid founder, the overnight billionaire— but that misses the texture of what he has built. Perplexity is not a social app, not a marketplace, not a delivery service. It is an attempt to remake the front page of the internet, its existence proof that the grip of the old order can be challenged. (By V Shoba)

Retail Princess: Isha Ambani, 33, Executive Director, Reliance Retail Ventures Limited

IN 2011, ISHA AMBANI, still a student at Yale University came on a break to her home in Mumbai, and having to submit coursework, voiced her exasperation to her father about the slow broadband connection. Recounting this incident at an awards function seven years later, Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, termed it the trigger point for what would become Jio, that now, under its umbrella, has pivoted India’s biggest company from traditional old economy petrochemicals to one shaping new India with technology. Isha has been an integral part of this journey ever since joining the company full-time after finishing her education and a short stint at McKinsey. The span of Jio’s retail division extends from familiar superstores, international toy brands, to online e-commerce and high-end luxury, and she has been the spearhead of it all.

A non-executive director in the mothership, Reliance Industries, she is described on their website as having made Reliance Retail “among the Top-10 Retailers in Asia and the only Indian retailer in the list of global top 100 retailers.” This year when the company held its annual general meeting, she gave an indication of the scale of what was ongoing. The gross revenue of retail was a whopping ₹3.3 lakh crore, and they had, over the year, added more than 2,500 stores, taking the total to nearly 20,000 stores in 7,000 towns.

Her footprint extends over more than the corporate sphere. Reliance Foundation is the philanthropic arm of the company, and as a director, Isha focuses on initiatives related to children and women. A mother of two, she has in media interviews spoken about them being conceived through IVF and how she consciously speaks about the treatment so that it is normalised and women don’t feel isolated for undertaking it. Another area that she is involved in is art and culture, overseeing the Reliance Foundation’s initiatives in these fields. At the Met Gala, she is part of the Indian presence in arguably the world’s most famous fashion event in service of a charity, with the funds raised going towards the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

As the next generation of the Ambanis begins to steer Reliance, Isha is pivotal to the shape and scope that it will take. (By Madhavankutty Pillai)

Vintage Vibe: Kartik Kumra, 25, founder, Kartik Research

AT 25, KARTIK KUMRA is well on his way to achieving goals many Indian designers and fashion brands spend a lifetime chasing. With Kartik Research, a menswear label he founded in 2021, Kumra is bringing Indian crafts-forward fashion to Paris Fashion Week runways and in the wardrobes of the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Lewis Hamilton, Paul Mescal, and Hanumankind.

Kumra did not train to work in fashion, though he may have always been naturally inclined to good design. Collecting and reselling sneakers and streetwear gear was an early interest and he began working on Kartik Research while he was still in college, studying graduate economics at the University of Pennsylvania. The brand, initially called Karu Research (Kumra’s nickname), began during the pandemic between returning home and learning via Zoom. Travelling to crafts clusters and engaging with artisans around the country, he began with small-batch collections and one-off designs that were displayed and sold via social media—Instagram and Discord—and pop-ups in New York. The result was a brand that began to find a fan following before Kumra had even graduated.

As Indian fashion has evolved, a number of designers and labels now work in close association with craftspeople and handwoven textiles. Homegrown names are carving out a niche in the international market, but Kumra stands out for the incredible pace at which his label has made its mark. Following a position as semi-finalist in the prestigious LVMH Prize in 2023 and other mentorship programmes, Kumra became the first Indian designer to feature on the official Paris Fashion Week Men’s calendar in 2024. This year, he did even better, helming Kartik Research’s official runway debut at Paris Fashion Week with a collection titled ‘How to Make In India’ that has caught the attention of the global press.

Its garments may be handmade in India, but Kartik Research’s major markets are international. Buyers and retail customers appreciate the eye for detail and Kumra’s signature “Indian Future Vintage” aesthetic which translates Indian crafts techniques and motifs into graphic elements that feel at home on hoodies and denim. Kartik Research’s list of stockists stretch from Europe and the US across Asia, with hallowed stores like Dover Street Market (across Paris, London and Tokyo) and Selfridges in London on the roster as well as online platforms such as Mr Porter and SSENSE. If stores are the benchmark of a brand’s success, Kumra opened his first flagship in New York this year. All this before the brand has turned half-adecade old. But as Kumra often says, he is just getting started. (By Sohini Dey)

In A Class Of His Own: Alakh Pandey, 34, founder and CEO, PhysicsWallah

ALAKH PANDEY LOOKS less like a billionaire than like the neighbourhood teacher he once was: plain shirt, unfussy diction, chalk dust still clinging to the imagination. But the numbers tell another story. PhysicsWallah, the company he built from YouTube videos, is now worth billions, and his own fortune, according to the Hurun India Rich List 2025, is estimated at ₹14,510 crore, placing him ahead of Shah Rukh Khan this year. The story has the air of folklore. In 2014, Pandey, then in his early twenties, began uploading simple physics tutorials to YouTube. The backdrop was a rented room; the lessons were unpretentious and accessible. In a country where the gatekeepers of engineering and medical entrance coaching demanded fees unaffordable to most families, his free videos spread like contraband hope. Within a few years, PhysicsWallah was no longer just a channel but a movement. Students began referring to him as bhaiya—an older brother who explained complex concepts without jargon.

In 2020, Pandey formalised Physics Wallah as a platform, offering structured courses and test prep modules at prices that undercut incumbents by orders of magnitude. By 2022, venture capital had discovered him. A $100 million funding round from WestBridge and GSV Ventures valued the company at $1.1 billion, making it a rare teacher-founded edtech unicorn. Pandey was suddenly not just an educator but a founder, the kind of title that carried expectations of expansion, metrics, and scale.

What distinguishes him is that the persona never quite changed. Even as Physics Wallah added offline coaching centres, mobile apps, and a workforce of thousands, Pandey retained his style. In interviews he appears in simple shirts, speaking Hindi, dismissing the gloss of corporate life. He often says he is a teacher first and an entrepreneur later, an identity his audience recognises and rewards. In FY25, Physics Wallah reported 4.46 million paid users, 2.70 million daily active users, and 4.13 million unique transacting users across its platforms, while expanding to 13 education categories. Its courses now span from JEE and NEET prep to UPSC and state board examinations.

Physics Wallah’s identity is tied closely to Pandey himself; students sign up not for a platform but for a teacher. As the company expands into new markets, will that intimacy survive? Can the brand outgrow the man from Prayagraj who rewired Indian education without an Ivy League degree or a boardroom? Whatever the future may hold, Pandey’s story embodies a different kind of aspiration from the glossy unicorn narrative. (By V Shoba)

Speed Models: Aadit Palicha, 24 & Kaivalya Vohra, 22, Founders, Zepto

IN RETROSPECT, AN event that traumatised the world—Covid and the lockdown—turned out to be the moment for the unfurling of the entrepreneurship journeys of two of India’s youngest self-made billionaires. Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra were students at Stanford pursuing computer science and the idea for a startup was already being mulled when the pandemic led to a return to India. Cooped up in their homes, the vast runway technology-driven grocery delivery could have in India became apparent. Zepto began as KiranaKart, where the initial idea was to bring local stores into an app-based platform to service customers quickly. Initially they aimed at 45 minutes and even did their own runs doing deliveries. But then it dawned on them that there was an exponential correlation between customer satisfaction and the time taken to deliver. Speed became the guiding model. It evolved into the company having its own stores and delivery personnel. This meant greater control over both quality and speed. It wasn’t smooth sailing. The two young men with no experience working in any corporate setup were against competitors like Amazon, Swiggy’s Instamart and Zomato’s Blinkit.

They still managed to carve out their space in a market that was taking shape but also needed enormous capital. Launched in Mumbai, Zepto soon spread to other parts of the country. It is now valued at $5 billion.

In a recent podcast, Palicha said that what drove them was the love of building, and not what came out of it for personal ends. Palicha and Vohra, both under 25, have created value that most entrepreneurs cannot imagine. The Hurun India Rich List called them the youngest entrants to the list of Indian billionaires. Between the two, their net worth is close to ₹10,000 crore. They think of Zepto as a great internet company in the making which India needs, especially if it has to be at the forefront of the AI revolution. In a recent post on X, Palicha gave some of Zepto’s not-so-well-known achievements—giving livelihoods to 1.5 lakh people and paying more than ₹1,000 crore in taxes to the government. Bigger things were in store as he added, “I can promise that any capital we generate from this business (and it honestly looks like we will) will be invested towards long-term innovation and value creation in India.” (By Madhavankutty Pillai)

The Equaliser: Vidit Aatrey, 34, founder and CEO, Meesho

VIDIT AATREY DOES not come from privilege. The son of a Delhi Jal Board employee, he grew up in a modest apartment at Rohini, and living, what he has described, a lower middle-class existence. What he had in plenty when he grew up was ambition, enough to make him quit a well-paying job in ITC, and then later a job at InMobi, so he could team up with his IIT Delhi batchmate Sanjeev Barnwal to launch a startup, and the ability to spot new opportunities and to reshape his business ventures to meet them. This is how he converted a failing idea into Meesho, one of India’s largest e-commerce marketplaces worth an estimated $3.9 billion today.

Aatrey’s first attempt at building an online marketplace was a flop. He had then built a local e-commerce platform that gave users access to small business shops in a particular locality in Bengaluru’s Koramangala region. Even when he connected this platform seamlessly to WhatsApp, which he had noticed shopkeepers were anyway using to stay in touch with customers, it didn’t save it from becoming a dud. What Aatrey however noticed in due course was that while local shopkeepers were not onboarding, some individuals, predominantly women who sold goods on WhatsApp groups, were increasingly using this platform. Aatrey tweaked his platform then, away from offline shopkeepers and towards these smallscale entrepreneurs proliferating on WhatsApp. What made Aatrey’s business proposition stand out was that while he was dabbling in e-commerce, he wasn’t trying to build another Amazon or Flipkart. His platform was meant to make e-commerce work, in his words, for the millions of Indians the internet had left behind. It democratised e-commerce, helping smallscale entrepreneurs of unbranded goods sell their products to the large, thrifty populations of India’s less affluent but still sizeable tier 2 and 3 cities. This also meant Aatrey had to take a different approach compared to established e-commerce players, like building apps that took up little space and could run smoothly on lowend phones, to not charging sellers any commission.

Aatrey has been constantly reshaping the platform over the last 10 years, whether it was with its brief foray into grocery delivery during the pandemic to building a contentled affiliate programme, Creator Club, where creators earn commissions by sharing product links on social media. He has also launched Valmo, the logistics arm that today handles a substantial part of Meesho’s daily orders. With a rumoured IPO listing on the horizon, Aatrey’s vision continues to redefine India’s digital commerce space. (By Lhendup G Bhutia)

Fintech Prodigy: Shashvat Nakrani, 27, founder, Bharat Pe

FEW EMBODY THE audacious spirit of India’s Gen Z billionaire entrepreneurs quite as well as Shashvat Nakrani. He was only 19, pursuing a degree at IIT Delhi, when he decided the programme was a waste of his time, dropped out, and teamed up with Bhavik Koladiya, and later Ashneer Grover, to transform India’s digital payments system. Today that idea is BharatPe, valued at over ₹23,000 crore. And Nakrani, estimated to be worth ₹1,349 crore at the age of just 27, is one of the country’s youngest selfmade billionaires.

Nakrani’s success came from spotting an opportunity that was visible, but one that few had considered solving. In that period when digital payments were first beginning to take off in India, incumbent firms like Paytm and PhonePe used closed-loop QR codes that only allowed transactions between one platform and which charged merchants a small percentage on every transaction that was carried out. This was a glaring gap in India’s growing digital economy, with small kirana stores and street vendors grappling with clunky and costly transactions. It was also hindering the wide-scale adoption of digital transactions. Nakrani and his cofounders instead came up with an interoperable UPI QR code that allowed merchants to accept payments from any app — Paytm, PhonePe, Google Pay—without exorbitant fees or fragmented systems. Their zero-MDR (merchant discount rate) model also disrupted the whole system and led to such wide-scale adoption of digital transactions that today you can buy anything from a single cup of tea at a stall in some remote corner of the country to vegetables using your mobile phone.

BharatPe’s ascent was swift and seismic. In 2018, Nakrani and his cofounders had introduced their interoperable UPI QR code. By 2021, the company had hit unicorn status with a $2.85 billion valuation, fuelled by investments from heavyweights like Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global. Nakrani has since been instrumental in evolving BharatPe into a full-stack financial services powerhouse. Today, it offers lending, insurance, and POS solutions, processing billions in transactions annually and holding licences as an NBFC and payment aggregator. It hasn’t always been smooth sailing.

In 2022, the company’s internal scandals—centred on Grover’s alleged financial irregularities—burst into the open and led to high-profile exits and legal battles. Nakrani however stabilised the ship, and is today steering the company towards an impending IPO. His influence also ripples across India’s startup ecosystem. He is an active angel investor and has backed many ventures across fintech, healthcare and technology. As India races towards a $5 trillion economy, Nakrani, through his work at BharatPe and his other investments, is scripting the next chapter of India’s fintech saga. ( By Lhendup G Bhutia)

Staying Power: Ritesh Agarwal, 31, founder and group CEO, PRISM

BACK IN THE early 2010s, aggregator platforms of all sorts, from those dealing in taxis to restaurants, were taking the market by storm. But the tourist accommodation space was a different beast. You wouldn’t mind booking a cab driven by an unknown individual, but would you repose the same faith to stay in an unknown hotel in some unfamiliar area for the duration of a trip? Ritesh Agarwal realised the need to standardise accommodations, guaranteeing a certain standard and safety, and building the trust of users. Thus was born OYO Rooms, a chain of previously unbranded budget hotels accessible to anyone with a smartphone.

It wasn’t surprising that Agarwal was able to build this idea into a wildly successful business. Born into a middle-class family in a remote area, Bissam Cuttack in Odisha’s Rayagada district, he had harboured the dream of building a startup for quite some time. He told Open in an earlier interview that he had moved to Delhi by his teens, after having dropped out of college, and was living in a barsati, often struggling to pay rent, while he did the rounds of startup conferences in the city to come up with an idea and some capital to back it up. He first launched Oravel, an Airbnb-like platform, which listed out bed-and-breakfast properties, when he was still just 17, but once he figured out how essential it would be to bring about some standardisation in this space, and armed with a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship grant from Peter Thiel, he changed his initial idea and came up with OYO instead.

OYO’s impact has been huge. It is today spread across 35 countries, and is said to have over 100 million customers. Its offerings range from budget hotels to luxury spaces, vacation homes, extended stays, co-working spaces and even event venues. It is also trying to rebrand itself, amid talk of a possible IPO listing later this year, shedding its earlier image of a budget hotel aggregator to the global hospitality and travel-tech platform that it has become. The company faced a major low when the pandemic disrupted the travel industry. But Agarwal has kept bouncing back, and according to Hurun’s latest Rich List, his net worth is estimated to be ₹14,400 crore. His story proves that irrespective of where you are born, with the right idea and ambition, any dream can become reality in today’s India. (By Lhendup G Bhutia)

Beautifying the Legacy: Ananya Birla, 31, founder and Managing Director, Birla Cosmetics

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Ananya Birla, the eldest daughter of Kumar Mangalam Birla, held an AMA (ask me anything) on X. Most of the questions were along predictable lines, asking about her day-to-day habits and her inspirations, until someone asked, “Aap wahi Birla ki beti ho? Cement wale? (Are you the daughter of that Birla associated with cement?)” “Haan Ji (Yes),” came Ananya’s viral response. “Ultra tech was the name, last time I checked.”

You couldn’t really fault the user for being unsure whom she was talking to. The Aditya Birla Group may have been around for generations, with Kumar Mangalam Birla being regarded as one of corporate India’s most respected faces, but Ananya had until recently been seen more on the lifestyle pages of newspapers, for her music career and for becoming Maybelline New York’s brand ambassador, than in the business sections. But that is now rapidly changing, as the Birla scion takes on a deeper role in the Group, while also taking it into newer spaces. She is already on the boards of many of its firms, from Hindalco and Grasim to Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail and Aditya Birla Management Corporation, and is also said to be looking at strategy in many other firms.

This should not be entirely surprising. Ananya, who studied economics and management at Oxford University, had showed her entrepreneurial streak when she founded Svatantra Microfin, a microfinance institution, when she was only 17. This was a time when financial institutions were very wary of expanding loans and financial services to rural areas. Since its founding, back in 2012, Svatantra has grown to become, with over 2.5 million active customers, the country’s second-largest non-banking microfinance company. She has also launched other projects, from Ikai Asai, a luxury design brand, to a homegrown AI platform (Sophius) that is awaiting a larger rollout, apart from championing mental health awareness through her Mpower initiative.

The Group is foraying, under her stewardship, into India’s booming beauty and personal care (BPC) industry. This market has exploded in recent years, and has begun attracting both established and new players. The BPC market is said to be worth around ₹1.6 lakh crore and is estimated to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 10 per cent over the next five years. Ananya has taken a leap into this competitive market with her Birla Cosmetics, which she runs as its founder and managing director. It plans to launch products in a phased manner, and some of those that have hit shelves—like LOVETC, which is positioned as a premium, inclusive cosmetics brand, and Contraband, launched as a gender-neutral fragrance and personal care line targeting Gen Z and millennial audiences—have already created a stir. (By Lhendup G Bhutia)

Secure and Savvy: Trishneet Arora, 31, founder and CEO, TAC Security

TRISHNEET ARORA is often in transit but his reference point remains fixed: a mother in Chandigarh who still asks the same question every day: Have you eaten? From New York to Toronto to Milan, Arora’s days are measured in airports and boardrooms, but the refrain does not change. It is the counterpoint to everything else—IPO, contracts, acquisitions, new product launches—that his work requires. As steady as his mother’s question, security is the centrepoint of technology, unchanged through the passing fashions of crypto, blockchain, and AI, says Arora, joking that his mother will remain the same whether his net worth is in lakhs or in crores of rupees.

Arora is the chief executive of TAC Security, a company that today claims to secure the digital infrastructure of 6,000 firms worldwide, including India’s own clearinghouse of payments, NPCI, and the Bombay Stock Exchange. “We are the fifth largest vulnerability management company globally,” he says, on a Zoom call from JFK, headed to Toronto to open TAC’s Canadian operations. After that, he will fly to Italy, then back home to India for Deepavali. Arora was born in Punjab in 1993. He left formal schooling early, drawn instead to the circuitry of computers, to the illicit thrill of discovering what could be broken into. The lore of his career begins with a modest family loan of ₹75,000, enough to print visiting cards and begin offering security workshops. From there the arc is familiar: early contracts with state police, the gradual accumulation of corporate clients, expansion abroad. He says now that he worked too hard in those first years, slept little, sacrificed health. But then he shrugs: he knows that is why he made it. And why he continues to run on four hours of sleep even today. Arora splits his time between Mumbai and the US. “The gravitational pull of home is something I feel all the time. I am proud that I was able to build from India security solutions for the world,” he says. He is fond of stories, and there are some he loves to tell over and over. The first is about a president and his mother. A newly elected leader, he recounts, urged his wheelchair-bound mother to fly to Washington to attend his swearing-in. She agreed. At the ceremony, someone turned to her: “You must be proud.” She said, “Yes, but you know, my other son is a doctor.” The story is apocryphal, and Arora tells it with a kind of wonder. His own brother, an engineer, stayed back in Chandigarh to run the family business. He has a three-year-old daughter who will soon start school.

When TAC Security listed on NSE Emerge in March 2023, its IPO was oversubscribed nearly four hundred times. Shares listed at a premium, valuing the company at about ₹400-450 crore on debut. Today TAC is valued at close to ₹1,500 crore. TAC bought European firm Cyberscope earlier this year. “We felt like we were now in a different league. It forced us to confront blockchain security, a field outside our comfort zone. We had to learn to become the first movers in Web 3 security,” he says.

Arora has a net worth of over $215 million but he is far from done. For the near future, Arora will continue to juggle many roles: the hacker who rose from modest beginnings to the global stage, the nationalist who wears business suits, the family man who is never home.(By V Shoba)

The Learning Curve: Parita Parekh, 33, founder, Toddle

PARITA PAREKH CAME to edtech as a curriculum thinker. A Brown University and Stanford alumnus in education, she has long been immersed in the language of inquiry-led learning and how it shapes young minds. Before Toddle, she cofounded Toddler’s Den, a progressive, Reggioinspired preschool where she helped architect the curriculum and culture. The experience sharpened her sense that technology often overlooks the teacher, the person stitching together lesson plans, assessments, portfolios, and family communication. Toddle was conceived as the opposite: a product built around teacher workflows, from collaborative planning to reporting, with a community layer for sharing resources and practice.

She started Toddle in 2019 with cofounders Deepanshu Arora, Gautam Arora, Misbah Jafary, and Nikhil Poonawala, each bringing complementary expertise in technology, business, and design. Together they set out to build a platform that placed teachers, not just students, at the centre of ed-tech. Parekh serves as Head of Learning, translating pedagogy into product. The company’s first foothold was in the International Baccalaureate (IB) ecosystem where Toddle became a planning and assessment hub for Primary Years Programme schools. From the start, the platform emphasised a teachers-first philosophy and product-led growth. Today it positions itself as an AI-enabled teaching and learning hub for progressive K-12 schools and districts.

In early 2023, Toddle raised $17 million from Sequoia Capital India, Matrix Partners India and others, with the aim of expanding beyond its IB niche into a broader K-12 stack. The funding round signalled investor faith in an educatorbuilt product that focused not on splashy gamification but on cutting daily friction for teachers. Recognition has since followed. In 2024, Parekh was named among India’s youngest women entrepreneurs on the Hurun India Under-35 list. For a founder steeped in pedagogy, the milestone is a signal that India’s educatorled products can compete globally. What distinguishes Parekh’s imprint on Toddle is the insistence that good software should feel like good classroom practice—clear intent, minimal friction, authentic evidence of learning. It is a stance that has earned the platform unusually high advocacy among school leaders and teachers.

If ed-tech’s last decade was crowded with student-facing apps, Parekh’s work represents a bigger bet: empower the adult who shapes the room. Toddle is less a dashboard than a staffroom ally, and Parekh its quiet architect—moving the centre of gravity back to teachers, where real learning still begins. (By V Shoba)

The Banarasi Chic: Palak Shah, 33, founder and CEO, Ekaya Banaras

SOMETIMES, YOU HAVE to be foolish to do big things,” says Palak Shah, 34, founder and CEO of textiles label Ekaya Banaras. Yet, in 2012, when Shah returned with a degree in business from King’s College, London, to join her family’s decades-old textile business, the brand was little more than a figment of the imagination and her own role in the company was a means of “killing time”. “My father wanted me to get married.

Women in my family had never worked. My mother and grandmother had been homemakers.”

Shah had bigger ambitions in mind—setting into motion her father’s long dream of opening a retail outlet and branding their textile saris. “In those days, we never imagined this was possible. Nobody wanted to feature us or call us, or work with us because we were seen as dukaandar (shopkeepers),” she says. “I was enamoured by luxury brands, like Louis Vuitton or Hermès. I dared to be stupid, thinking I will sell my saris like luxury products.” At 21, not long after her return, she moved to Delhi on her own and hired a team to start building the foundations of Ekaya Banaras.

In over a little more than a decade since, Ekaya Banaras has reinvented its heritage Banarasi textiles as high fashion offering with contemporary designs, omnichannel retail presence, and buzzy collaborations which have expanded the use of the brand’s textiles beyond saris into ready-to-wear fashion, furniture and jewellery. While her father manages production, Shah helms retail operations, creative strategy, and business development. She has also become the veritable face of the brand, infusing her own stories and styling ideas for Ekaya’s collections turning saris into an aspiration for celebrities and consumers alike. With reported revenue exceeding ₹80 crore, the business is growing at 25-30 per cent with e-commerce contributing almost 15 per cent of the revenue. “Our customer base has increased, with a lot of Gen Z (clients),” she says. “We have five stores and I am working to finalise a sixth by the end of this year.”

Now based in Mumbai, Shah loves what she does too much to fret about lack of work-life balance or living out of suitcases as she travels for work and events. And her dreams are bigger than ever before. “I want Ekaya to go international, and not just for the Indian diaspora,” she says. “I want the sari to be a part of many more people’s wardrobes.” (By Sohini Dey)

Monetising the Magic

Alia Bhatt, 32 , actor

MAHESH BHATT SAYS his daughter is a 21st-century woman and indeed whether it is her work as an actor, an entrepreneur, or a mother, she does everything well. Alia Bhatt’s business investments indicate her interests, from her eco-friendly baby clothing brand Ed-a-Mamma to her investment in the recycled incense brand Phool.co. Reliance has already picked up a 51 per cent stake in Ed-AMamma.

Like several other women actors, she has an investment in the cosmetic brand Nykaa. Reportedly, Alia’s investment of ₹4.95 crore multiplied significantly to ₹54 crore in 2021 when Falguni Nayar’s company debuted on the Indian stock market. Alia also has an investment in the fashion-tech startup Style Cracker, co-owned by Dhimaan Shah and celebrity stylist Archana Walavalkar. Clearly, she has an eye for growth—Phool.co has witnessed a significant growth of around 130 per cent in the past few years. In 2023, Alia also invested in SuperBottoms, a sustainable baby and mom care brand. Add to that her production company and her net worth at 32? ₹175 crore. (By Kaveree Bamzai)

Aryan Khan, 27, filmmaker

IF YOU HAVE NEVER heard of Bunty Singh or his wife Leti Blagoeva, you are forgiven. They are partners with Aryan Khan in his company SLAB Ventures under which they began a luxury collective brand named D’YAVOL, named after the Slavic word for Devil. It is supposed to be inspired by the Faustian bargain struck by blues musician Robert Johnson to achieve musical success. The name clearly indicates Aryan’s artistic leanings, no doubt honed by an undergraduate degree at the University of Southern California as well as his business instinct.

Something forbidden is always more exciting than something easy accessible. The fashion brand D’YAVOL X is clearly intended for friends and family with similar bank balances, with the signature suede jacket bearing his famous father Shah Rukh Khan’s signature priced at ₹1.75 lakh. It is the liquor vertical that the company is pushing seriously, which was strategically placed in Aryan’s directorial debut series for Netlfix, The Ba***ds of Bollywood. The brand has teamed up with the brewing company Anheuser-Busch InBev to launch a super premium vodka, a blended malt scotch, and a tequila in partnership with Radico Khaitan, Shah Rukh Khan and Zerodha cofounder and podcaster Nikhil Kamath. Aryan’s estimated net worth at the age of 27 is ₹80 crore. (By Kaveree Bamzai)