Dreamers and Doers
Founders who built formidable companies before their batchmates were even promoted. Heirs who enlarged an empire entrusted to them. Performers who turned an audience into a business. Still under 35, they share an appetite for scale and impatience to start early. Whether they develop the artificial intelligence that businesses rely on, host the conversations a generation tunes in to or open airports, they are writing the next draft of Indian ambition.
Heir and flair: Anant Ambani
31, executive director, Reliance Industries Limited; founder, Vantara
On June 19, when Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani spoke at its annual general meeting, he spoke of his youngest son Anant Ambani as leading the energy businesses. He added that Anant, together with his elder sister and brother, was also heading the Jio IPO process. Jio’s IPO listed on October 28 and became the biggest that Indian markets had ever seen. Anant took to the stage on the occasion and reminisced about the journey that began with his grandfather.
A graduate of Brown University, US, Anant is on the boards of a number of the group’s ventures, from retail to new energy. He also has a footprint outside the world of business, in animal conservation. He is the founder of Vantara, a massive 3,000-acre forest that houses rescued animals. On October 4, World Animal Day, he launched an initiative, ‘Champions of Care’, that brought more than 50 animal welfare organisations together to create a network that will work together across the country for the common cause.
–Madhavankutty Pillai
Inheritance of Influence: Ananya Birla
32, founder, Svatantra Microfin, Birla Studios, Birla AI Labs, Birla Cosmetics
Ananya Birla was just 17 when she founded Svatantra Microfin, which is now India’s second largest non-bank microfinance lender. The story goes that a coconut water seller told her that he couldn’t grow his business because he had no access to capital. This showed her the need for a lender. She is from the fifth generation of Birlas, one of the leading industrialist families of India, but has made an identity as an entrepreneur. In August, Svatantra filed a draft red herring prospectus to take Svatantra public with a Rs 3,000 crore IPO.
In 2026, she launched Birla Studios, a film production company, and Birla AI Labs, a business around AI. Another business she is helming is Birla Cosmetics, launched in 2025. There are also other facets to her. She is a singer with public performances to her credit, something that began in her student days at Oxford University. She decided to forgo that path in 2024 to concentrate on other endeavours. Online, she is also an influencer with four million followers on Instagram.
–Madhavankutty Pillai
Fintech Finesse: Shashvat Nakrani
28, cofounder, BharatPe
It is one thing to spot an opportunity, and quite another to execute it at scale. Shashvat Nakrani was just 19, pursuing a degree at IIT Delhi, when he noticed that India’s fintech sector, then in its infancy, had a big problem. Digital payment platforms like Paytm and PhonePe were then using closed-loop QR codes that allowed transactions only within their own platforms. This limitation, coupled with transaction charges, meant that India’s many small shopkeepers and street vendors were still staying away from digital transactions. Nakrani dropped out of college, teamed up with Bhavik Koladiya and, later, Ashneer Grover, and kickstarted a fintech revolution. Their BharatPe offered an interoperable, zero-fee UPI QR code system that united all payment apps onto a single merchant placard.
The growth was dizzying. Nakrani was 19 when he started BharatPe. By 23, BharatPe had become a unicorn and he was on the Hurun India Rich List. Today, his net worth is estimated to be around Rs 1,500 crore. The journey wasn’t without its hiccups. Nakrani shepherded the company through the exits of the other two cofounders, including Grover’s, which led to much acrimony and a legal battle. Earlier this year, after nearly a decade of building BharatPe, Nakrani officially stepped down as chief operating officer, even though he remains a board director and strategic adviser.
Nakrani, who has been backing many ventures across domains as an angel investor, said he wanted to go back to his roots and build something new. There have been no announcements on a new venture yet, but many are keeping a keen eye on what Nakrani comes up with next.
–Lhendup G Bhutia
Soaring Ambition: Jeet Adani
28, director, Adani Airport Holdings
The Adani Group has been growing exponentially under its Chairman Gautam Adani and his younger son Jeet Adani helms one of its most consumer-facing sectors: airports. When Adani Airports signed an agreement with The Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL) to build eight hotels with over 2,000 rooms in four airports, it was Jeet Adani, as director of Adani Airport Holdings, who signed it.
In the last few years, the company has managed to get eight airports under its belt and, last year, one of the most important, the Navi Mumbai International Airport went live, and has started to bring international flights to the financial capital of India. Bids are being reportedly planned for 11 more airports. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, and after returning to India, joined the office of the group’s chief financial officer. Since then, besides airports, Jeet Adani also leads a number of ‘future-focused verticals’, including AI, data centres, defence and more.
.–Madhavankutty Pillai
Batting Beyond Boundaries: Kaviya Kalanithi Maran
34, executive director, Sun TV Network; CEO, Sunrisers Hyderabad
Sun TV is one of the leading entertainment and news business in Tamil Nadu, and Kaviya Kalanithi Maran, daughter of its founder, has been involved in the business since 2016 and an executive director since 2019. She holds an MBA from the Leonard N Stern School of Business, New York University. The latest annual report of Sun TV describes her as actively involved in the “conceptualization, monitoring and execution of several strategic initiatives in the Company, apart from directly spearheading the Company’s foray into the digital domain, professional sports and movie production”.
It is in the largely male-dominated arena of sport that she has carved a niche. The company owns Sunrisers Hyderabad, the Indian Premier League team, and whether at auctions where players are selected or at the games themselves in stadiums, she is now the face of the team ownership. She is steadily turning Sun’s cricket portfolio global. In recent times, the company has bought Sunrisers Eastern Cape in South Africa’s SA20. This was followed by a £100 million purchase of Northern Superchargers, in UK’s The Hundred. The team is now known as Sunrisers Leeds.
–Madhavankutty Pillai
Searching Eyes: Aravind Srinivas
32, cofounder and CEO, Perplexity
In August 2025, a three-year-old company offered Google $34.5 billion for its Chrome browser. The bid was unsolicited, and nearly double Perplexity’s own reported valuation of about $18 billion at the time. It came from one of the most visible challengers to Google search, started by an engineer from Chennai, Aravind Srinivas.
Srinivas has a Master’s degree in electrical engineering from IIT Madras, and a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley, with research stints at OpenAI, Google and DeepMind along the way. In August 2022, he cofounded Perplexity in San Francisco with Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski. Perplexity’s edge lies less in building the biggest AI models. It has developed its own Sonar models and also routes queries to third-party ones. Ask the AI search engine a question in plain language and it searches the web, reads what it finds and hands back an answer, with sources linked in citations.
Srinivas’ net worth is estimated at Rs 28,500 crore. Perplexity’s last completed funding round, in 2025, valued the company at $20 billion. In August this year, when it was reported to be in talks to raise money at a valuation of more than $30 billion, its annualised revenue run rate had crossed $750 million, up from under $250 million at the start of the year. Srinivas has said the company would list in 2028.
–V Shoba
Voice Control: Tanay Kothari
28, cofounder and CEO, Wispr Flow
On October 30, Tanay Kothari put up a LinkedIn post saying that Wispr Flow had just crossed 100 billion words dictated, signalling the scale of the company he had cofounded. Wispr Flow is now one of the most widely used voice dictation apps in the world, and it is driven by AI. Kothari, a Delhi boy, was a coder by his early teens. When he was still in school, he cofounded Proximity, whose app could tell friends and family when someone was in their city or vicinity.
In 2016, he went to Stanford University to study computer science. He cofounded Wispr in 2021 after finishing his Master’s. The company is now valued at $2 billion in just five years. AI response quality is driven by prompts, and making voice typing of lengthy prompts easy was the niche that got Wispr traction. It is now widely used in mobile phones and computers. Kothari is expanding Wispr’s scope. In August, it became able to automatically transcribe meetings.
–Madhavankutty Pillai
Cool Concierge: Ashwin Sreenivas
31, cofounder and president, Decagon
Ashwin Sreenivas grew up in Kochi and then left for Stanford University to study computer science, where he was marked out for his promise. An article on him from 2017 has a Stanford teacher calling him ‘one of his best students’. After launching one startup that was acquired, in 2023 he cofounded Decagon, which brands itself as an AI concierge. It has among its clients companies such as Notion and Duolingo.
Essentially, Decagon’s AI handles any query that a customer has. It answers and fulfils requests, removing humans from the equation except as second-level supervisors. This means enormous savings for client companies. Decagon’s valuation in the short three years of its existence has risen to $4.5 billion. Ashwin is among the few who have managed to turn the AI revolution into a huge business, with annualised revenue already crossing $100 million. Interestingly, he and his cofounder, instead of beginning with an idea, first asked around to identify a problem companies faced that AI could solve and scale. Customer support was their insight. At present, with the excellent conversational abilities of large language models and development of agentic AI, this seems inevitable, but they were early movers who pinpointed how AI could radically alter the nature of businesses.
–Madhavankutty Pillai
Quick on Their Feet: Aadit Palicha (24) and Kaivalya Vohra (23)
cofounders, Zepto
They were school friends in Mumbai who went to Stanford to study computer science and quit before finishing. The Covid lockdown gave them a problem to solve back in India. Their neighbours could not get groceries, so they built KiranaKart, which delivered from local stores. In 2021, they launched Zepto, built on dark stores and a 10-minute delivery promise.
Five years on, Zepto is one of the three companies that have defined Indian quick commerce, alongside Blinkit and Swiggy Instamart. As of March 2026, it ran 1,139 dark stores and counted close to 48 million annual transacting users, people who ordered at least once in the year. In the January–March quarter, it handled about 210 million orders, roughly 23 lakh a day. Zepto has reportedly agreed to raise about Rs 1,000 crore in a pre-IPO placement at a $4.5 billion valuation. Palicha’s net worth is estimated at Rs 3,500 crore and Vohra’s at Rs 2,600 crore.
–V Shoba
Solar Savvy: Hardik Kothiya (32) and Chirag Nakrani (33)
cofounders, Rayzon Solar
In 2016, fresh out of college in Surat, Hardik Kothiya and his friend Chirag Nakrani went looking for an industry on the verge of a boom, and settled on solar energy. Nakrani came from a family in real estate. In February 2017 the two incorporated Rayzon Green Energies and set up a 40-MW module line that turned out about a hundred panels a day. First-year revenue was roughly Rs 1 crore.
By March 2025, module capacity at the company’s Karanj and Sava plants had reached 6GW, 150 times where it began, and FY25 revenue stood at Rs 2,830 crore. By August 2026 the company reported capacity of 11.3GW. In April 2025, Rayzon raised Rs 150 crore from about 90 individual investors, among them Sachin Tendulkar, who put in Rs 5 crore. Nakrani joined Shark Tank India as a judge that year. Each founder is estimated to be worth about Rs 1,100 crore.
–V Shoba
Data is Destiny: Prukalpa Sankar
34, cofounder and co-CEO, Atlan
Prukalpa Sankar met her cofounder on a bus. She was studying chemical engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Varun Banka, a computer engineering student, sat next to her on the ride from campus into town. Months later they spent their final year testing startup ideas together. In 2013, at 21, she and Banka moved to Delhi and started SocialCops, a data company for governments and development agencies, on about $25,000 gathered from crowdfunding, competition prizes and grants. SocialCops went on to build data platforms for Indian government programmes.
Atlan grew out of an internal tool SocialCops built to manage its own data and was launched publicly in 2020. Its software helps enterprises discover, understand and govern their data, including tracing where it comes from and how it is used. In May 2024, Atlan raised $105 million in a round led by GIC and Meritech Capital at a valuation of $750 million. Its customers include Mastercard, JPMorgan, Nasdaq and Autodesk.
–V Shoba
Star’s Stripes: Alia Bhatt
33, actor and entrepreneur
This year marks the sixth anniversary of Alia Bhatt’s entrepreneurial turn with Ed-a-Mamma, an apparel brand she founded in 2020. She continues to front the label through an expansion journey of its product range and retail footprint, all this while multi-tasking with a thriving movie career.
Her recent film Alpha may have failed to light up the box office, but the actor is now looking forward to Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s ‘Love & War’, among other projects. She remains one of Bollywood’s most bankable stars but also makes films with Eternal Sunshine Productions that she cofounded with her sister Shaheen. Launched in 2021, the company has produced movies like the Netflix hit Darlings and Jigra (both starring Bhatt) and more recently, the Prime Video coming-of-age comedy Don’t Be Shy. As an ambassador for brands like Gucci, L’Oréal and Levi’s, Bhatt has also become one of the most recognised Indian celebrities at the MET Gala and Cannes Film Festival.
–Sohini Dey
Staying Power: Ritesh Agarwal
32, founder and group CEO, PRISM
Back in 2021, when Ritesh Agarwal’s Oravel Stays Limited—the parent company of OYO—first filed papers to go public, the startup was already hailed as one of India’s great success stories. A college dropout had emerged from nowhere to transform the country’s hospitality industry by aggregating budget hotel rooms. While that initial IPO plan was shelved amid post-pandemic market volatility and geopolitical conflicts, the intervening five years have seen Agarwal fundamentally reinvent the business.
For starters, the firm has been rebranded from Oravel Stays to PRISM. It is no longer a mere aggregator of budget hotel rooms in India, but a global hospitality giant managing everything from iconic US motel chains to luxury European villas. In fact, India contributes just a sixth of its total revenue today. The company’s pivot owes much to its founder’s ambition. Agarwal has always been someone who has dreamt big, right from the time he was doing the rounds of startup conferences as a 17-year-old in Delhi, even while he struggled to make rent sometimes. He had moved to the city from his hometown, Bissam Cuttack, in Odisha’s Rayagada district, and even when the first iteration of OYO struggled, he quickly adapted. Winning the $100,000 Thiel Fellowship grant helped, but it was his ambition and the ability to constantly innovate and adapt that enabled him to scale his company so rapidly.
Now a popular face on TV—as a judge on Shark Tank India—with an estimated net worth of Rs 19,900 crore, Agarwal is once again shepherding his company towards a proposed IPO.
–Lhendup G Bhutia
Being Secure: Trishneet Arora
33, founder, chairman and group CEO, TAC Security
As Trishneet Arora puts it, when he was about eight, he took apart his father’s computer in Ludhiana and could not put it back together. At the repair shop, he watched the technician closely. His father, a tax consultant, later set a password to keep him off the machine. Arora cracked it the same day, and his father, rather than punishing him, bought him a new computer.
He failed Class 8, by his own account, because history and geography meant nothing to him, and finished Classes 10 and 12 through open schooling. By his late teens he was running cybercrime workshops for Punjab Police. In 2013, at the age of 19, he founded TAC Security, a vulnerability management firm built on the idea of hacking a client before someone else does. TAC Infosec, the company behind the TAC Security brand, listed in 2024 and is valued at over Rs 800 crore. In April 2026 its reported client base had crossed 10,000. It reported adding about 1,600 more in July–August. At its tenth annual general meeting in September, it reaffirmed its guidance of Rs 100 crore in revenue for FY27 and promised two AI products. Arora holds about 54 per cent of the company.
–V Shoba
Shining Example: Ishendra Agarwal
33, founder and CEO, GIVA
In 2019, when Ishendra Agarwal cofounded GIVA, he anticipated a major shift in the Indian jewellery industry. He believed the modern consumer was moving away from seeing jewellery purely as a financial investment for weddings and towards seeing it as an everyday fashion accessory.
Turning that insight into a successful business took time. In its early days as an online-only store, sales were slow—picking up significantly only after the brand partnered with a popular gifting portal. Then in 2022, GIVA opened its first exclusive brand outlet, kickstarting a rapid retail expansion that now spans over 300 outlets.
While several established players operate in this space, Agarwal differentiated GIVA by offering affordable designs with a core focus on silver. To overcome the hurdle of building consumer trust online, the IIT Kanpur alumnus introduced authenticity certificates, lifetime replating services and a liberal return policy. Today, Agarwal is scaling GIVA aggressively. Moving beyond its silver roots, the brand has expanded into solid gold and lab-grown diamonds, while also tapping into the growing men’s jewellery segment. He is also targeting further retail expansion, with a sharp focus on India’s Tier-II cities. The company’s valuation has kept pace with this jump in scale. After its last round of funding earlier this year, GIVA’s valuation rose to around Rs 4,900 crore.
–Lhendup G Bhutia
Content is Queen: Masoom Minawala
32, influencer and investor
At the turn of the new millennium, and even into its first decade, few imagined that one day content creators and influencers would rival movie stars in reach, influence and earnings. Indeed, these professional choices were yet to appear. In those days, there were bloggers. And Masoom Minawala was one of them. A Mumbai girl who started a blog titled Miss Style Fiesta to express her love for fashion and build a career in the industry. Much has changed in the decade and a half since: bloggers are now influencers, videos have eclipsed text, Instagram rules the roost. Minawala has navigated all these inflection points to become one of the country’s most popular fashion influencers, promoting top homegrown designers and global luxury brands, and walking the red carpet at Cannes, while making content full-time.
Alongside sharing her love for fashion and family days with her husband (diamond merchant Shailin Mehta) and two children, Minawala has leveraged her content creation skills into a bona fide business model. Her personal brand got a further boost with her 2024 book, She'll Never Make It: My Journey from Doubt to Dominance, and more recently, The Masoom Minawala Show, a star-studded podcast featuring the likes of Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Arianna Huffington, and Tarun Tahiliani. Coming from a business family and married into one, Minawala is also nurturing her own entrepreneurial spirit with an array of investments and an equity partnership at the footwear label CAI Store.
–Sohini Dey
Calling His Own Shots: Aryan Khan
28, filmmaker and entrepreneur
Fame has been Aryan Khan’s companion his entire life—the predictable consequence of being the eldest son of Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan. Bearing a striking resemblance to his father, many concluded that the young man’s entry into the movies was inevitable, especially after his voice-acting turn as Simba in the Hindi dub of The Lion King (2019). Khan did make it to show business but defied everyone’s expectations by going behind the camera. In 2024 , he made his debut as showrunner, writer and director with the Netflix series The Ba***ds of Bollywood, scoring a hit with an entertainer set in—where else—the Hindi film industry.
Khan continues to navigate the perks of stardom as well as its pitfalls—having experienced it through the highs and lows of his father’s career as well as his own trials in 2021 when he was arrested during a raid on an alleged rave on a cruise ship. Later cleared of charges, his experiences also became material for The Ba***ds of Bollywood whose sophomore season is expected to start filming early next year. But films aren’t the only business keeping Khan busy. He’s an entrepreneur helming D’YAVOL Luxury Collective, a venture he cofounded with Leti Blagoeva and Bunty Singh, in partnership with Shah Rukh Khan, Radico Khaitan and Nikhil Kamath. D’YAVOL Spirits, the spirits vertical of the venture, made its US debut this October while D’YAVOL X—the luxury lifestyle brand—expanded from streetwear to eyewear in the same month.
–Sohini Dey
Clean Profit: Manik Garg
31, managing director, Saatvik Green Energy
Saatvik Green Energy was incorporated in May 2015 and began making solar modules the next year in Ambala, Haryana, with 125MW of capacity. Manik Garg, who studied at the London School of Economics (LSE), runs it alongside Neelesh Garg, also an LSE graduate.
In September 2025, Manik took the company to the stock market with a Rs 900 crore IPO: a Rs 700 crore fresh issue and a Rs 200 crore offer for sale, priced at up to Rs 465 a share. The issue was well subscribed. Module capacity in Ambala now stands at 4.8GW, and a 4-GW plant is coming up at Gopalpur in Odisha. In 2026, Saatvik commissioned a 2-GW encapsulant facility, bought 80 per cent of Melcon Transformers and Electricals to move into power equipment and won a Rs 638 crore order for TOPCon solar cells. In September, it secured a Rs 1,041.63 crore order from the Solar Energy Corporation of India. In FY26 revenue from operations rose to Rs 4,548 crore from Rs 2,158 crore, and profit after tax to Rs 357 crore from Rs 217 crore.
The company has signed Kartik Aaryan as its brand ambassador. Manik and his family are reportedly worth Rs 2,300 crore.
–V Shoba
The Art of Mindful Living: Mira Rajput Kapoor
32, entrepreneur
Barely out of college, Mira Rajput made her first headlines when she married actor Shahid Kapoor in an arranged marriage. The fact that she was 21 and a good 14 years younger than her husband was fodder for celebrity gossip but a decade since her wedding, Rajput—now mother to two children—has made a name for herself beyond her marriage.
She has found favour among fashion and lifestyle labels as a brand ambassador and showstopper. Watching her trajectory may not have initially suggested that she would go into business but Rajput has taken steps in that direction over the past few years. Known for her longstanding interest in beauty and wellness, she cofounded the vegan and cruelty-free brand Akind in collaboration with Reliance Retail’s Tira Beauty in 2024. More recently she has focused on on expanding Dhun, the “wellness sanctuary” she started last year in Mumbai to offer luxe wellness solutions ranging from Ayurveda to cryotherapy for Indian consumers. Dhun is now gearing up for launch in Delhi, the city where Rajput grew up.
–Sohini Dey
Delivering Success: Vaibhav Khandelwal
34, cofounder and CTO, Shadowfax
Sometime around 2014, Vaibhav Khandelwal was a research analyst working for a US hedge fund when the delivery economy boom in India was just picking up. He teamed up with a friend, Abhishek Bansal, to launch Shadowfax, which would act as an aggregator of delivery partners, helping other businesses deliver goods to their customers. That idea has grown into a logistics service provider that is today one of the key firms powering the country’s delivery economy, delivering everything from e-commerce parcels to groceries and food for quick commerce firms and restaurants. Its distribution network covers more than 2,200 cities and over 14,000 pin codes.
The business may be an unglamorous one, but the world of last-mile logistics—from unpredictable demand spikes to the usual cash-on-delivery options, doorstep checks and returns—is anything but simple. Khandelwal has built a company capable of handling all these messy complications. As its chief technology officer, he scaled the business dramatically by keeping it asset-light and solving complex logistics bottlenecks by relying on technology, whether that was developing an in-house mapping layer that enabled faster deliveries and allowed nearby orders to be grouped together intelligently or leveraging AI to validate product pickups in real time. The validation of Khandelwal’s approach came earlier this year, when Shadowfax went public. Today, it has a market value of about Rs 16,000 crore.
–Lhendup G Bhutia
Cashing in on Culture: Navya Naveli Nanda
28, entrepreneur
In October this year, when Navya Naveli Nanda announced Naveli Ventures—the strategic venture arm of the Nanda Family Office aiming to invest in deep tech, space, clean energy, AI, advanced manufacturing, and health—she added another undertaking to a résumé she has been building from her teens. Coming from a family of entrepreneurs as well as Bollywood royalty, Nanda makes the most of both legacies. On one hand is her stint at serial entrepreneurship with Aara Health, a health-tech platform for women, as well as social ventures like the non-profit Project Naveli and the Nimaya Foundation. Long before she graduated from IIM Ahmedabad, Nanda was already in the boardrooms and factory floors of Escorts Kubota Limited, her paternal family business.
But if one half of Nanda’s family means business, the other half rules hearts and minds. Maternal granddaughter to Amitabh Bachchan, she may not have pursued films, but found her own way into popular culture with What the Hell Navya, a podcast she launched with her mother, Shweta Bachchan, and her grandmother, Jaya Bachchan. The filmi background, combined with her entrepreneurial choices, has turned Nanda into something of an offbeat pop culture role model and a coveted ambassador for brands and collaborations—the most recent being Montblanc which has announced her as a ‘friend of the brand’.
–Sohini dey
The Conversationalist: Raj Shamani
29, podcaster and entrepreneur
Making a viral podcast is no mean feat but Raj Shamani makes it look easy—chatting up a staggering variety of personalities on his show Figuring Out. Think Sunil Chhetri to Jaishree Sharad, Bill Gates to Emmanuel Macron, and no one more notorious than Vijay Mallya. Be it entrepreneurs, celebrities, politicians or crooks, Shamani’s ability to set up candid conversations has turned his podcast into the highlight of a growing media enterprise with more than 2.1 crore followers only on YouTube. Reports put Figuring Out among the world’s most popular podcast channels and Shamani has also been signed by talent agency WME for international representation.
It has been a long journey for Shamani who has always displayed a knack for trying something new. Growing up in a business family in Indore, he joined the family trade early and briefly ran his own dishwashing liquid brand, creatively named Jadugar Drop. He may no longer be producing cleaning products but Shamani is still keen on business. As the cofounder of House of X, a platform aiming to support Indian direct-to-consumer brands, Shamani has invested in startups and enabled creator-led brands like the fragrance brand Blanko, launched in partnership with the rapper and musician King, among its early ventures.
–Sohini Dey
Sexing It Up: Aditya Kumar Halwasiya
32, chairman and managing director, Cupid
A few months ago, when Hurun India released its annual rich list, a surprise lay in store for many. The person whose wealth had grown the most in percentage terms was the promoter of a contraceptive firm who wasn’t even in the top 1,000 richest people in India the year before. The individual was Aditya Kumar Halwasiya, the chairman and managing director of Cupid, whose wealth had jumped 859 per cent to Rs 18,800 crore, catapulting him to the 193rd rank on the list.
Halwasiya comes from a well-known industrialist family of Kolkata—the Universal-Halwasiya Group—with business interests spread across multiple domains. Halwasiya himself holds directorships and investments across a number of companies beyond Cupid. When he acquired Cupid back in 2023, it was known largely as an exporter of contraceptives, one whose products were mostly used in the programmes run by international organisations such as WHO and UNFPA. Since taking control, Halwasiya has led Cupid to look beyond just being a supplier of contraceptives for aid organisations and move towards becoming a more consumer-facing producer of personal care products and everyday consumer goods. Today, it retails skin and hair care products and fragrances, apart from contraceptives, lubricants and diagnostic kits.
With India witnessing a boom in sexual wellness and personal care products, Halwasiya couldn’t have timed his company’s shift better.
–Lhendup G Bhutia