Isha Ambani, director of Reliance Retail Ventures, and Parita Parekh, co-founder of Toddle, have been included in the 2024 Hurun India Under-35 list of the youngest women entrepreneurs. Both the executives are aged 32 years and are part of an elite group of 150 entrepreneurs who have built multi-crore businesses, while first-generation entrepreneurs qualify for a valuation of USD 50 million and next-generation leaders require USD 100 million.
Ankush Sachdeva, 31, the founder of Sharechat is the youngest entrepreneur on the list. Aakash Ambani of Reliance Jio Infocomm also features in the list. Released on Thursday, the list comprises 123 first-generation entrepreneurs, making up 82% of the total. Participants hail from 41 cities, with Bengaluru and Mumbai leading the count with 29 and 26 entrepreneurs each.
According to Anas Rahman Junaid, MD and Chief Researcher at Hurun India: “Our research throws light on the vibrant entrepreneurial spirits of India’s Under-35 demographic, for such a demographic is thriving amidst the broadening of this country’s economy. These young leaders have rapidly built successful businesses while taking charges of geopolitical complexity as well as inflation.”.
Junaid further said: “We expect that every one of the Under-30 founders has developed businesses worth around $10 million. The older age group, Under-35, will come in at around $50 million each, although some have scaled to a hundred times that value. Given the strong economic fundamentals of India, we expect many of these aggressive Under-30s will make their way on to the over-30 list as their businesses continue to succeed.”
Out of the 150 entrepreneurs featured, seven are women, four of whom are continuing their family legacy. In terms of education, IIT Madras leads, with 13 graduates on the list, followed by IIT Bombay with 11, and then IIT Delhi and IIT Kharagpur with ten graduates from each. The bare minimum age of the entrepreneurs featured is 33.
Based on the number of followers, Unacademy, by Roman Saini and Hemesh Singh, stands at the top; the second is Vidit Aatrey’s Meesho, followed by Sumit Gupta of CoinDCX, Neeraj Khandelwal, Govind Soni of CoinSwitch, Sushant Goel of Third Wave Coffee, Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar of Razorpay, Lal Chand Bisu of Kuku FM, and Ghazal Alagh of Mamaearth along with Alakh Pandey of Physics Wallah.
