Vijay Shekhar Sharma, 41, Entrepreneur

Here’s a reason, beyond his net worth of $2.6 billion, Vijay Shekhar Sharma is regarded as a knight in the citadel of free enterprise that is start-up India. He built India’s first profitable payments bank by solving a fundamental cultural problem: reliance on cash. The Aligarh boy who won over top investors Jack Ma, Masayoshi Son and Warren Buffett and got them to invest in Paytm pushed an open door when India proposed to go cash-free. The subject of a Harvard case study, the unicorn, which has 310 million users and facilitates 16 million transactions every day, is now building an ecosystem with lifestyle, education and financial services to retain customers and shore up revenues. The country’s digital payments industry is estimated to hit $1 trillion by 2023 and VSS, as he is known in the start-up fraternity, will continue to be a force to reckon with. Even with every fifth investment going into a fintech company and global competition, including Facebook and Google, headed his way, Sharma mirrors the optimism of the Indian start-up scene and continues to address real, world-shaping problems.

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