(October 9, 2022) A Lok Sabha session in August this year saw Ashwini Kumar Choubey, Minister of State in the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change claim that around 34.7 lakh tonnes per annum of plastic was generated in India during 2019-20, out of which 15.8 lakh tonnes per annum of plastic waste was recycled. What began in the 1960s as a popular material for consumer products and a tangible sign of modernity has turned into an environmental hazard in the last few decades. While activists are continuously raising their voices against the use of single-use plastic, Hyderabad-based entrepreneurs Mani Kishore Vajipeyajula and Rajkiran Madangopal have already stepped on the gas, so to speak, with Banyan Nation, a startup that’s helping global brands use more recycled plastic instead of virgin plastic.
Mani Kishore Vajipeyajula and Rajkiran Madangopal are the founders of Banyan Nation
“Recycling activities in India are driven by market forces that are informal, illegal, and largely invisible. Millions of ragpickers scavenge the streets or bins or the landfills collecting valuable materials, which they sell to the kabbadiwallahs, who then sell to backend aggregators, who finally sell to the recyclers. The goal of such an industry is to recover the material at the lowest possible costs, and at any cost,” says Mani Kishore Vajipeyajula in a video on the company’s website. That’s when he decided to take things into his hands and started Banyan Nation in 2013 to convert post-industrial plastic waste into high-quality recycled granules – Better Plastic – comparable in quality and performance to virgin plastic.
Mani and Raj first met at the University of Delaware, where they were pursuing their engineering degrees. It was during his MBA at Columbia Business School that the idea of Banyan Nation struck Mani. “I always knew going into business school that I wanted to solve real-world problems plaguing developing economies. During one of my travels in India, the filth deeply disturbed me. However, I realised something amazing was happening underneath. India was recovering and recycling almost double that of any developed or developing economy in the world. Yet the benefits of such a system were not being felt. I wanted to solve all this and build an organisation that would fundamentally transform the way India saw recycling and plastic,” the Global Indian says in the video, adding, “This is how my journey from Silicon Valley to the back alleys of Hyderabad began.” After working at companies like Motricity, Saint Gobain, Infospace, and Qualcomm for years at length, the two quit their lucrative jobs in the US to launch their startup.
Plastic is an environmental hazard
Such has been the impact of Banyan Nation that each year, it recycles 3600-tonnes of high-density plastic, which in turn saves huge carbon footprints. They have now recycled over one lakh tonnes of plastic, which also helped it bag the Circulars Awards at the World Economic Forum (2018) and World Economic Forum Global Technology Pioneers (2021). In 2020 itself, Banyan Nation helped to lead FMCG firms to make 100-million shampoo and lotion bottles using their recycled plastic. By 2030, they hope to replace 100,000 tonnes of virgin polymers with recycled plastics.
While Mani calls plastic “the most versatile invention of our time”, the entrepreneur is aware of how single-use plastic has become “an ecological and environmental poison.” It’s this discernment that led him to take action as he calls a “formal recycling system” the need of the hour which ensures “a superior quality, and the ability to recycle the material that has entered the system more than once.”
“We started by building a simple app in Hyderabad where we mapped over 1500 stationery recyclers. This data gave us a bird’s eye view of the city such as the amount of waste coming out of the house, and data on local efficiencies of collection and transportation of waste. At Banyan, we have used thermal and mechanical testing to produce a high-quality recycle that rivals virgin plastic. When the product enters the waste value chain, its ability to be recycled increases by a factor of three,” the entrepreneur explains.
Banyan Nation is changing the way India recycles and thinks about plastics and waste management. With the startup, Mani and Raj have found a way to convert plastic waste into reusable plastic, thus stopping it from making its way into landfills. “Our goal is to achieve scale and profitability while staying true to our core mission of solving the menace of plastic pollution and creating lasting environmental and social impact,” Mani, whose company is now aiming to have an installed capacity of 50,000 tonnes by 2024, told Forbes India. The entrepreneurs believe that collaborations with policymakers, corporations, and other startups can bring a shift in how Indians view plastics.
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(May 4, 2024) In today's data-driven world, companies collect vast amounts of information, hoping to unlock valuable insights. Those insights find their way into reports and presentations but often end up not being used, for a number of reasons. For instance, the reports could be too complex and full of jargon for non-technical people to translate into actionable steps, or have so many potential improvements that teams become overwhelmed and don't know where to focus. Change can also be difficult and organisations could struggle to adapt their processes or culture to these new insights, even if they might be beneficial to them. This is the gap that Shub Bhowmick and the team at Tredence are hoping to bridge. For over two decades, Shub Bhowmick has grown as a 'problem solver, entrepreneur and technology leader'. In 2013, he co-founded Tredence, a data science and AI engineering company that now has over 1000 employees with offices in Foster City, Chicago, London, Toronto and Bengaluru. Their clients include over 30 Fortune 500 companies in a wide range of sectors, as they work specifically towards solving this last mile problem in analytics. [caption id="attachment_51261" align="aligncenter" width="368"] Shub Bhowmick[/caption] Discovering the potential in data analytics
After graduating with a B.Tech degree in Chemical Engineering from IIT-BHU, Shub went on to do an MBA at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. He has held high ranking positions at Diamond Consultants (currently PwC), Mu Sigma, Liberty Advisor Group and Infosys. His career in data analytics began at a consultancy in Chicago, Diamond Consultants. "Around 12 or 13 years back I was involved in a data analytics practice that Diamond had created, and I was deeply influenced by this experience," he recalls, in an interview with Nasscom. "I realised for the first time how significantly data management can actually have an impact."
From there, he moved to Mu Sigma, which he describes as another deeply inspirational experience. "I was able to see how data analytics services are not just an add-on service offering - at Mu Sigma, it was the core and basically the only service offering," he said. Over a decade ago, Mu Sigma was at the forefront of last mile services in data analytics, and worked to provide actionable business insights for Fortune 500 companies. They offered a range of data analytics services, helping clients collect, clean, analyze and interpret vast amounts of data. They even had their own Art of Problem Solving platform, which is a set of tools designed to help clients translate vast amounts of data into concrete solutions, emphasizing actionable strategies over reports. "They were able to create a very interesting business model around this," Shub recalls. "The industry was also starting to attract some really good talent and nurture them into future leaders."
Still, Shub would wonder if there was a better, more efficient way to deliver this service. "Back then, in the analytics industry, most of the companies and providers relied on a manual process, on a value chain that involved pulling data typically into a throwaway MS Office based data file, using Excel for the analysis, some bit of SaaS, Power Point based summary and delivery." This was a decade ago, when cloud technology was still very new and not really in use. "It was basically a sales automation platform, there was no Azure or Google Cloud," Shub explains.
The tech-centric approach to business insights
Around 2012-13, Shub Bhowmick, then based in Silicon Valley, saw an opportunity to start a different kind of data service. "We brought the essence of business analytics, which is the focus on business insights, but we combined that with engineering, to deliver insights in a more efficient, value-driven, adoption-focussed way." This set them up from the competition too, as they moved away from business analysts and the manual processes towards a more technology centric approach. "We were using big tech to automate portions of the value chain and create greater scale and speed in insights delivery."
Over the last seven years or so, cloud-based platforms and hyperscalers took the world by storm, and production workloads quickly moved to cloud tech. Tredence Inc didn't waste time in getting on board, and began developing 'cloud-centric capabilities to deliver analytics services with a focus on adoption and shortening the time to impact," the Global Indian explains. "Cloud and data analytics are very much intertwined and will continue to be so in my opinion, as enterprises invest in cloud native AI capabilities," he adds.
The age of generative AI
The arrival of generative language model Chat GPT was another game changer. "I had never heard the use of the word 'hallucination' in my industry until we all came across this explosion created by OpenAI', Shub said in an interview. "Since then it's been the only topic everybody's talking about, especially in technology." He has watched the ecosystem grow, from a time in Silicon Valley where companies hired AI experts to work in isolated corners of office buildings, to now, where titles like 'Chief AI officer' are common, and AI developers are a core arm of big tech.
"We had talked about AI for a long time, we used to call it advanced data science and applied analytics, and just AI for the longest time. Now we call it Generative AI but the idea is not very different," he says. "It's about how you take data, information that you already have within your firewall, or leverage other data sources and then help your executives make more meaningful decisions to improve their business." At Tredence Inc, he says, the team is working on fine tuning foundational models, and prompt engineering systems to cater to their existing clients, and provide them with a wide range of highly customised insights through AI language models. Coding assistance is another important segment, as the industry begins to recognize that generative AI can significantly improve the productivity of all kinds of engineers.
In March 2024, Tredence decided to invest 10 percent of its annual revenues in developing GenAi and advanced AI capabilities across engineering, customer experience, machine learning operations, supply chain and other verticals in data analytics. Through this the San-Jose based startup is looking to grow revenues by 40 to 50 percent, Shub Bhowmick told ET. "We're building AI language models by fine-tuning foundational models. These models need not be large in size, we are using public and proprietary data of our customers to create agents to serve their unique needs in sectors such as retail, consumer goods, healthcare, telecom, banking and financial services and manufacturing."
(May 11, 2022) In the last few years, India has emerged as the third largest ecosystem for startups globally with over 66,359 DPIIT-recognised startups across 642 districts. With many global leaders looking to invest in Indian market, the country is witnessing a boom in the number of unicorn companies - privately held startups with $1 billion valuation or above. Interestingly, India’s startup landscape has seen close to 100 unicorns being added since January 2019. Furthermore, the country is expected to birth more than 250 unicorns by 2025, according to the Iron Pillar report ‘India Tech Trends'. As the technology ecosystem continues to grow, Global Indian turns the spotlight on five companies, who recently made it to the country's unicorn club. MindTickle - Krishna Gopal Depura, Deepak Diwakar and Nishant Mungali In 2011, three Pune-based techies - Krishna Gopal Depura, Deepak Diwakar and Nishant Mungali started a group to take part in gamified knowledge-based treasure hunts as a hobby. The idea was not only to do something interesting, which could be at the intersection of fun and learning, but also transform the mundane life of corporates. Intrigued with the possibility of making a business out of their passion, they approached investors
the mundane life of corporates. Intrigued with the possibility of making a business out of their passion, they approached investors in 2011, pitched them MindTickle, and positioned the startup as a gamification platform for corporates.
Ten years later, it was valued at $1.2 billion by SoftBank Vision fund, making it a unicorn company. Though MindTickle had its share of teething troubles, the founders never gave up on their vision. During an earlier interview, Krishna shared that though they were able to grab the attention of marquee venture capitalist (VC) fund Accel in 2012, over the next five years the business kept trickling in.
They had their eureka moment in 2015, when the founders realised that they were trying to sell their product in the wrong market. To set things right, MindTickle team used LinkedIn to gauge the need for training for sales executives. After realising that their product suited the US market, they focussed sharply on solving the pain points of business leaders who were looking for sharper and ready sales staff for their business.
Soon MindTickle started striking multi-million dollar deals with single customers. In 2017, MindTickle raised $27 million. Two years later, came $40 million in a series C round. Next to follow was a hefty cheque of $100 million from SoftBank Vision Fund in November 2020, which made MindTickle SoftBank’s first software-as-a-service (Saas) investment in India.
The startup now claims to have over 250 customers, and gets 80 percent of its revenue from the US, with the rest coming from Europe and Asia.
The pharma industry has never been an organised sector in India. However, a six-year-old company changed the game by bringing together patients, pharmacies and diagnostic centers on one platform. In 2015, two young Mumbaikars – Dharmil Seth, an alumnus of IMT Ghaziabad, and Dr Dhaval Shah, an MBBS from Rajiv Gandhi Medical College, came together to digitalise the medicine industry, so that one could order their medicines from a wide range of e-commerce medical stores online and get them delivered online without any hassles.
Since then, its B2B business has grown manifold. In 2019, PharmEasy merged with Ascent Health, to form API Holdings, which brought in three new co-founders on board – Siddharth Shah, Hardik Dedhia, and Harsh Parekh. In 2021, the startup joined the unicorn club and became the first e-pharmacy to do so with a valuation of $1.5 billion.
However, PharmEasy has its share of challenges, including the supply chain logistics. The biggest roadblock initially was the lack of digitised records. To overcome this, the founders ensured that every retailer they work with has digital records and a proper system by offering inventory management and accounting tools.
Today, the B2B pharma distribution business connects over a whopping 100,000 retailers to around 4,500 distributors. Furthermore, PharmEasy is looking to expand its diagnostic business which has witnessed a massive surge in the past year.
Backed by Ratan Tata and Accel Partners, Moglix was launched in 2016 by an IIT-Kanpur and ISB alumnus, Rahul Garg. Headquartered in Singapore, its mission is to tide over the gap between B2B merchants and consumers, and develop an exclusive digital-trade ecosystem, tailor-made to satisfy the diverse needs of buyers and sellers.
One of Asia’s largest and fastest-growing supply chain services companies, Moglix joined India's unicorn club in May 2021 after raising Series E round funding of $120 million that boosted the company's valuation to surpass the $1 billion mark. However, the company did go through some tough time during the global pandemic. In the wake of the massive global supply chain disruptions due to the COVID-19, Moglix looked to partnering with enterprises across industry verticals to map their supply chain requirements and provide technology-enabled solutions that are customised and scalable. They even provided PPE, medical kits, cleaning and housekeeping items, and surface agents at economical prices through its e-commerce portal moglix.com.
At present, the company claims to provide solutions and industrial products to more than 500,000 small and medium enterprises as well as to over 1000 large manufacturers across India and the UAE. It has a supply chain network of over 16,000 suppliers, and operates across 40 warehouses along with an in-house logistics infrastructure.
Even though the world of crypto is still volatile with no clarity on the legality of the digital asset, two college friends- Sumit Gupta and Neeraj Khandelwal – pooled in all their life savings to start cryptocurrency exchange CoinDCX in 2018. Unfortunately, it was the same year when Reserve Bank of India issued a banking ban on crypto transactions. Several crypto startups had to shut shop or continue operations while navigating numerous roadblocks. CoinDCX, too, decided to fight the uphill battle and was among the few players that contested the regulator’s ban in court.
[caption id="attachment_24363" align="aligncenter" width="707"] Sumit Gupta and Neeraj Khandelwal[/caption]
In March 2020, the Supreme Court lifted the ban on cryptocurrency exchanges and one-and-a-half years later, CoinDCX became the first crypto startup to enter the unicorn club with a $90 million funding led by B Capital. During an interview, Sumit shared that the CoinDCX team has seen the total spectrum of fundraising in the space during their journey. What helped them was keeping their heads down and focusing on building their company.
With over 3.5 million users, CoinDCX is now aiming to make crypto more accessible in India and accelerate its efforts of bringing 50 million Indians into the crypto fold.
GlobalBees - Deepak Khetan, Nitin Agarwal, and Supam Maheshwari
Based on the Thrasio model, e-commerce startup GlobalBees was founded in May 2021 by FirstCry founder Supam Maheshwari and Edelweiss’ former President Nitin Agarwal. The idea was to acquire digital-first brands across categories such as beauty, nutrition, food, fitness, personal care, lifestyle, home, sports and lifestyle, which have a revenue rate of $1 million to $20 million, and help them scale up and grow. In just seven months, GlobalBees made it to the unicorn list in December 2021, by raising $150 million in a Series A financing round led by FirstCry.
In the last few years, many ecommerce brands have cropped up in India, owing to the evolution of the ecosystem with better logistics, deeper internet penetration, and increased consumer interest and trust. However, what make GlobalBees different is their ambition to build the product and focus on innovation. The company acquires and partners with sellers on Amazon and equips them with capabilities across marketing and growth, technology, distribution, sourcing, branding, warehousing, logistics, R&D, product development, and operations — all things essential to rapidly scale the brands in the digital space.
GlobalBees has acquired 12 brands across categories, including The Better Home, Prolixr, Absorbia, Yellow Chimes, HealthyHey, and others. Presently, the company’s strategy is to work with these and build them up.
(December 8, 2023) Early this November, a conversation between billionaire Elon Musk and India's IT Minister, Rajeev Chandrasekhar at AI Safety Summit, UK, unearthed a revelation. The 52-year-old disclosed that his son with Shivon Zilis has an Indian connect. He bears the middle name "Chandrasekar," a homage to the Nobel Laureate Professor Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Making the revelation, Rajeev Chandrasekhar tweeted, "Look who i bumped into at #AISafetySummit at Bletchley Park, UK. @elonmusk shared that his son with @shivon has a middle name "Chandrasekhar" - named after 1983 Nobel physicist Prof S Chandrasekhar." Look who i bumped into at #AISafetySummit at Bletchley Park, UK.@elonmusk shared that his son with @shivon has a middle name "Chandrasekhar" - named after 1983 Nobel physicist Prof S Chandrasekhar pic.twitter.com/S8v0rUcl8P — Rajeev Chandrasekhar 🇮🇳 (@Rajeev_GoI) November 2, 2023 Replying to Rajeev Chandrasekhar's tweet, Shivon Zilis tweeted, "Haha, yes, that’s true. We call him Sekhar for short, but the name was chosen in honour of our children’s heritage and the amazing Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar." Indian scientist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 "for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars." Global Indian puts the
Replying to Rajeev Chandrasekhar's tweet, Shivon Zilis tweeted, "Haha, yes, that’s true. We call him Sekhar for short, but the name was chosen in honour of our children’s heritage and the amazing Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar."
Indian scientist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 "for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars." Global Indian puts the spotlight on the Indian physicist.
The child prodigy
It was in the Pre-Independent India that Chandrasekhar was born into a free-thinking and Tamil speaking Brahmin family in Lahore to a civil servant father CS Ayyar. For him and his siblings, education began at home where their mother Sitalakshmi taught them Tamil and English, and their father would take the charge of teaching arithmetic and English before leaving for work every day. At the age of eight, he moved to Madras with his family as his father was promoted to the role of a deputy accountant general, and by 1921, he started going to a regular school. In the second year of his school, he was introduced to algebra and geometry, and he was so fascinated by the subjects that he ended up devouring the books the summer before the start of the school.
This interest led him to Presidency College in 1925, where he studied physics, maths, chemistry, Sanskrit and English. While his interest in physics and maths kept going, he was also inspired by S Ramanujan who had gone to England and was counted among the world’s most distinguished mathematicians. Though he eyed mathematics honours, his father was keen that his son too becomes a civil servant. But it was Chandrasekhar's mother who backed him up and asked him to follow his heart. Chandrasekhar opted for Physics honours in order to placate his father because his paternal uncle CV Raman was a noted physicist who had won a Nobel Prize in 1930.
The discovery that led to Nobel Prize
At the age of 17, he spent a summer working in his uncle's lab but soon realised that experimental physics wasn't his calling. However, in those days he befriended one of Raman's colleagues who introduced him to the work of Arnold Sommerfeld, one among a group of theorists revolutionising the field of physics through the principles of quantum mechanics. This group also had Ralph H Folwer who helped Chandrasekhar publish his first professional paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Towards the end of his college, he was offered a scholarship from Govt of India to study in England, and in 1930, he set off sail for the University of Cambridge. It was during his voyage that the 19-year-old, while reading physics publications, came across an insight that led him to win a Nobel Prize in 1983.
Almost seven decades ago astronomers saw a white dwarf for the first time. It's a tiny, hot, and super dense leftover from a star that ran out of fuel. But something didn't add up—this object should have collapsed under its own gravity. Fowler, who was going to be Chandra's teacher for a Ph.D. at Cambridge, figured out the mystery by using quantum theory to explain why the white dwarf didn't collapse. He explained that when the nuclear energy source in the center of a star such as the Sun is exhausted, it collapses to form a white dwarf, and he demonstrated that there is an upper limit — now called the Chandrasekhar limit — to the mass of a white dwarf star.
Moreover, up until that time scientists used to think that when a star used up all its fuel, it would become a cold ball of ashes—a white dwarf star. Chandra's math proved that a white dwarf heavier than the sun couldn't exist. Instead, it would collapse forever into an incredibly tiny point with infinite density. This collapse would create something called a black hole, a place in space where nothing, not even light, could escape. Chandra's work was the first undeniable proof, backed by math, that black holes, as we now call them, had to be real.
The controversy that changed it all
Excited about his discovery, he thought that he would be welcomed with open arms in Cambridge, however, his hoped were dashed as the scientists ignored his discovery. Depressed, he continued and finished his doctorate in 1933. The same year he also won a fellowship to continue his work at Cambridge. Feeling encouraged by these achievements, he went back to studying what happens to stars in the future. Surprisingly, the well-known Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, a leader in astrophysics, started visiting him often to check on his progress.
Encouraged by his support, Chandrasekhar prepared a paper for a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in London in 1935 that was to have all the leading figures in astrophysics in attendance. He presented the paper, showing a chart that if a star was heavier than a certain amount, it would definitely shrink away to nothing and even more. However, Eddington didn't back Chandrasekhar's conclusions and even stating that it has no basis in reality. His reputation was so strong that nobody felt brave enough to disagree with him. Chandrasekhar wasn't even allowed a chance to respond. The argument continued for many years in papers and during scientific meetings.
The confrontation had a lasting effect on Chandrasekhar, who for decades, didn't follow up on his discovery and even turned to a different field, and took up a position in University of Chicago. A few decades later, scientists trying to make the hydrogen bomb noticed that it resembled an exploding star. In 1966, at the Livermore National Laboratory in California, scientists started using computer codes for both astrophysics and hydrogen bombs. This breakthrough led the scientific community to accept that a star could indeed collapse and turn into a black hole.
Six years later, scientists identified the first black hole, named Cygnus X-1. Since then, many more black holes have been discovered. This meant that, 40 years after Chandrasekhar's first discovery, he was proven right, and Eddington was proven wrong. Chandra received the Nobel Prize in 1983 for his research on white dwarfs.
The scientist breathed his last in 1995 and four years later, NASA's premier X-ray observatory was named the Chandra X-ray Observatory in his honour.
And now the Nobel laureate is again in news as Elon Musk has named his son after Chandrasekhar. His groundbreaking contributions to astrophysics, particularly his work on the Chandrasekhar limit, significantly advanced our understanding of stellar evolution. Musk's choice to honour this scientist underscores the enduring impact of scientific pioneers and the importance of recognising their invaluable contributions to humanity.
(November 6, 2024) In 2006, Vani Kola returned to India after spending more than two decades in the United States, fueled by a desire to be part of a rapidly transforming landscape. This wasn’t just any homecoming; it was the beginning of a bold venture — Kalaari Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm that would become one of India's leading investors in technology startups giving 3x to 5x returns to its investors. Kola, a pioneer in venture capital in India, has invested in companies like Cure. Fit, Myntra, Snapdeal, Dream11, Urban Ladder, and YourStory which have thrived under her guidance. At 60, she has over 22 years of entrepreneurial experience in Silicon Valley and has invested in over 90 companies. Recognized as one of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in Business, Kola is dedicated to collaborating with entrepreneurs to create high-value businesses. What truly distinguishes her is her commitment to being accessible to her founders, along with her focus on nurturing and mentoring ambitious first-time entrepreneurs. "I approach everything with the question, ‘Will I find meaning in the context and horizon of time that truly matters to me?’ Ultimately, everything you do is for yourself," said Vani, whose venture capital firm
thing with the question, ‘Will I find meaning in the context and horizon of time that truly matters to me?’ Ultimately, everything you do is for yourself," said Vani, whose venture capital firm has grown to have over $650 million in assets under management.
Understanding that AI is the future, Kalaari Capital has been investing heavily in AI startups. Recently, they invested $2 million in Hyperbots, a startup that uses AI for finance and accounting, which was followed by another $2.25 million investment in Figr which uses AI to design products insanely fast with ease. Explaining why they invested in Figr, Kalaari Capital said, "Generative AI is now revolutionising design space, with AI agents autonomously executing design tasks and streamlining workflows from ideation to implementation."
Pushing the Envelope
Vani's story begins in Hyderabad, where she was born in 1964. Growing up, she faced the challenge of being one of only six women in a class of 400 electrical engineering students at Osmania University. The odds were against her, but Kola has always believed in doing things differently. "I was encouraged to dream, to pursue a career in a male-dominated world." She is grateful that she had a nurturing home and an encouraging school environment that nudged her constantly to push the envelope.
The Silicon Valley Chapter: Building Success Abroad
After earning her bachelor’s degree, she moved to the US in 1985 to pursue her Master’s degree from Arizona State University. This was a time when very few women chose this path, especially in fields dominated by men. After completing her studies, she settled in California, where she founded her first startup, RightWorks, in 1996. The company focused on global procurement management and quickly gained traction. Under her leadership, RightWorks was sold for an impressive $567 million, establishing Kola as a force to be reckoned with in the tech world.
Her success didn’t come without challenges; Kola often faced gender bias, with male colleagues questioning her commitment as a mother while pursuing her career. Reflecting on this, she recounted an experience where a male acquaintance asked if she felt guilty for leaving her infant daughter at home while traveling for business. “It just doesn’t occur to men! You just have to develop tools to cope,” Kola explained. It was her tenacity that helped her navigate these challenges, establishing herself as a strong entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. For many, including Kola, Silicon Valley represented not only a place of opportunity but also a launching pad for ideas that would later impact India and the world.
Returning to her Roots
After selling her second startup, Certus, in 2005, she took a moment to reflect on her future. It was during a solo trip to Hawaii that Kola experienced an awakening, realising it was time to return to India after briefly travelling to her homeland. It felt like a new country to her and she was drawn to it.
"This is a very different India and if I don't participate in it, India will be fine, but I will miss out. My entrepreneurial fervour or my entrepreneurial bone drove me here." -- Vani Kola
Founding Kalaari Capital: A Return with Purpose
Within a few months, she packed her bags and bought a one-way ticket to India in 2006, where she set up Indo-US Venture Partners which was later rebranded as Kalaari Capital, taking inspiration from Kalaripayattu, a martial arts form which to her represented entrepreneurial traits she deeply values - commitment, strength and perseverance. Having raised funds in North America, she came with credibility and reputation but she had to unlearn many things. Having worked for 22 years in Silicon Valley, she was keen to make India global. However, back then, the market was yet to evolve. "My US network and experience was useless because Indian companies weren’t rapidly going global at that point," she said, adding that's when she started venturing into e-commerce and gaming. "You can call it a leap of faith or a deep conviction but we started taking early bets on that." Despite entering into a new space in India, Vani was happy to take the chance as she saw it as an adventure and a learning experience that could test her in a fulfilling way.
Starting with an initial fund of $150 million, Kalaari Capital has expanded its portfolio over the years, investing in diverse areas such as e-commerce, gaming, digital media, and healthcare. Kalaari Capital was an early investor in Snapdeal, Myntra, Dream11 via Simplilearn, and many companies that made great returns. "Coming from a very conservative middle-class family, the sense of money and its value is very intimate to me. Money is a means to an end; it is not the end itself. But money brings responsibilities and obligations. We have always wanted to create par returns globally and have been able to consistently return 3x to 5x of our funds. This puts us in the top quartile in the world," the Global Indian revealed.
Her journey also intersects with the broader narrative of the Indian diaspora, particularly in Silicon Valley, where many Indians have made significant contributions to technology and entrepreneurship. This community has played a crucial role in the growth of the tech industry, bringing diverse perspectives and innovations. Vani, as part of this community, has demonstrated how cross-cultural experiences can lead to meaningful contributions back home.
Empowering the Next Generation of Innovators
Throughout her career, Kola has remained committed to empowering others. As a mentor to many first-time entrepreneurs, she actively seeks to bridge the gap in the venture capital space for women. When discussing the scarcity of women venture capitalists, she emphasised the need for more women in STEM leadership positions to create a more inclusive ecosystem. “You need women in those positions to be tech venture capitalists,” she asserted.
Reflecting on her journey, Vani Kola encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to embrace challenges without fear of risks. “The principle of pushing yourself for challenges without worrying about calculating the risk, but instead looking at the upside, looking at the positives was imbibed in me.” Her story is a powerful reminder that success is not just about the destination but also about the journey and the lessons learned along the way.
As Vani Kola continues to lead Kalaari Capital and support the next generation of entrepreneurs, her legacy will undoubtedly inspire many to break through barriers and redefine what is possible.
(December 10, 2024) Billionaire techpreneur Divyank Turakhia enjoys wing walking - a highly advanced daredevil stunt that involves moving, and performing on the wings of a plane during flight. If this isn't crazy enough, the 42-year-old, who made it to the billionaire's club when he was in his mid-thirties, happens to suffer from osteoporosis, which means that a bruising or a sprained ankle for the rest of us would mean a shattered leg, or a knee replacement surgery for him. But he does it anyway. And it's not because he's an adrenalin junkie, who gets his thrills from danger. In fact, it's quite the opposite. He's more cautious than you or me. He's risk-averse, in fact, and his thrill comes from managing that risk. That's also how the Turakhia brothers, Bhavin and Divyank, run their tech conglomeration, Directi, which began with they co-founded their first company back in 1998. They think big, taking on challenges that seem improbable, but execute their plan with caution. That's why their ideas have also paid off in equal measure. "Aerobatics is like business," Divyank told Forbes. "It's fun if it's done right. If it's not, you crash and burn. So you have to know
So you have to know your limitations, you have to have a backup plan for a backup plan." It’s a sentiment Bhavin Turakhia has also echoed over the years. "A bootstrapped mindset is much more important than a bootstrapped company," Bhavin Turakhia said. Today, the Turakhia brothers operate offices across the globe, shuttling between Mumbai, Dubai and California as they forge ahead in the cutting-edge world of tech entrepreneurship.
[caption id="attachment_61466" align="aligncenter" width="416"] Divyank and Bhavin Turakhia[/caption]
A calculated risk
At the start of the internet boom in India, in the mid-1990s, when Divyank was barely 16 years old, he and Bhavin, who was eighteen years old at the time, took a loan of Rs 25,000 from their father to start their own tech company that created domain names. What began in a corner of their kitchen has grown into a company that employs thousands globally, with offices all around the world. Directi operates a bouquet of tech companies with interests in ad technology, online payment services and even an instant messaging app. In 2016, still in their mid-thirties, the Global Indianbrothers made it to the billionaires’ club.
"Our two public exits in companies in the past few years are now worth more than $1 billion," Divyank Turakhia told QZ in an interview. One exit was in 2014, when they sold a part of Directi to the Endurance International Group for $160 million. The other was in 2016, when a Chinese consortium bought Media.net for $900 million, the third-largest ad-tech deal in history at the time.
The young entrepreneurs
Growing up in a middle-class home in Mumbai, Divyank Turakhia was a self-professed nerd. He loved video games, but rather than sit slack-jawed before the TV playing NFS, he wanted to build games. He began coding at the age of eight, and would stay late at school to learn because they didn't have a computer at home. When he was 13, he and his brother Bhavin spent all the their time writing a game, in which the protagonist was a businessman who had lost all his money. Interestingly, it wasn't a run of the mill revenge / action plot. Instead, to win the game, the player had to create a new business from the ground up. Winning was when you capture 100% of the market share. And bear in mind, this was all in the year 1994, when video games came in tapes that were slid into small consoles, and in India, having a computer game that was actually in colour was a huge luxury. In the US, media personalities were debating the pronunciation of @ and email was still strange and new. That was when Divyank and Bhavin, who were using a rudimentary dial-up modem to create a game that let their friends dial in to play along.
Divyank always thought like an entrepreneur, according to Wired. He would handle his wealthy friends coding homework for $10, which was a fairly princely sum in India at the time. Soon, the bigger corporations were knocking at the door, and Divyank had even helped NASSCOM get their connectivity up and running for an internet conference, which was really cutting edge stuff back then. "After that, every time some large company had a problem, they'd ask NASSCOM, who'd say, 'oh, there's this kid we know who can solve your problem'," he told Wired.
Consulting was fun, and brought him quite a bit of money, but he wanted more. And he was convinced the internet was where he wanted to build a business. It was quite a risky call - according to World Bank Data, only 0.14% of Indians were on the internet in 1998. In 1999, this number leapfrogged to 0.27%, a significant rise, but still a small number overall. It looked as if the Turakhia brothers were correct in saying that Indian businesses were going to be online. It led them to start their first company, a fledgling tech venture that sold domain names.
All the while, they were reading every book on tech culture they could find. There was plenty of motivation in the US - the dotcom boom had begun in 1995, and saw an explosion of internet startups. Businesses like Amazon, eBay and Yahoo were entering the fray, although they were just small companies then. Investors were bullish about the internet and poured billions into this industry, although most of the companies were operating at a loss. This optimism spilled over into NASDAQ too, and the stock exchange saw huge growth and companies went public and were promptly overvalued. Still, all this was happening far away from the Turakhia brothers' middle-class upbringing, and their only connection to it was books. "I think I read 11 books about Bill Gates," Bhavin told Wired.
It kept them motivated and they wanted to build a business that wouldn't tie them to being personally available to every single customer. They took a loan from their father, rented a US server and set up a web hosting company. Within a month, the brothers had made enough to pay their dad back and rent the server for three more months. By the time he turned 18, Divyank and Bhavin had made their first million.
Branching out
By the early 2000s, Directi was evolving rapidly. The brothers, who had started with domain registration, were now building platforms and services to address inefficiencies in the web services market. Bhavin spearheaded the development of LogicBoxes, a platform designed to automate operations for domain registrars. This innovation wasn’t just ahead of its time—it became a vital backbone for registrars worldwide, transforming how businesses managed domain portfolios.
Simultaneously, ResellerClub emerged as a cornerstone of Directi’s growth. Launched in 2003, it empowered small businesses to offer web hosting and domain services without the overhead of maintaining infrastructure. By the mid-2000s, ResellerClub was supporting thousands of resellers globally, and its success cemented Directi’s reputation as a leader in the domain and hosting industry. “ResellerClub was about democratizing access,” Bhavin explained in an interview. “We wanted entrepreneurs to build businesses using our platforms.”
While Bhavin focused on scaling infrastructure, Divyank identified another emerging opportunity: online advertising. In 2005, he launched Skenzo, an ad-tech platform that specialized in monetizing unused domain names through contextual advertising. Skenzo quickly became a pioneer in the industry, generating significant revenue and setting the stage for what would later become Media.net. Divyank’s knack for identifying trends early paid off, as Skenzo became one of Directi’s most profitable ventures.
Directi’s growth wasn’t without challenges. In an interview with Wired, Bhavin reflected on their early scaling years: “We were growing so fast that keeping up with customer demand was a constant battle. But we learned to build systems that could scale faster than us.” Their focus on automation and efficiency allowed them to serve a global audience without sacrificing quality.
Building a billion-dollar company
By 2008, Directi was a thriving ecosystem of businesses, ranging from domain registrars to ad-tech platforms. The brothers continued to reinvest profits into new ventures, with a relentless focus on solving real-world problems. Their ability to anticipate market needs and execute with precision became their defining trait.
The 2010s marked a turning point for Directi. As the company grew, so did its global footprint. They opened offices in Dubai, Austin, and other key markets, expanding their reach beyond India. This international focus was instrumental in driving revenue and attracting clients from around the world. “We always thought globally, even when we were operating out of our apartment in Mumbai,” Divyank told Forbes. Their global mindset paid off, as Directi became a trusted name in the tech industry.
In 2014, the brothers made headlines with their first major exit. Endurance International Group acquired several Directi businesses, including ResellerClub, BigRock, and LogicBoxes, for $160 million. This was a monumental milestone, but the Turakhias were far from done. As Bhavin described it, “The sale was a validation of what we’d built, but it also gave us the freedom to focus on even bigger ideas.”
Breaking records
Divyank’s next move would solidify his status as a visionary in the ad-tech world. Media.net, a contextual advertising platform he founded in 2011, grew rapidly under his leadership. By 2016, Media.net was one of the largest players in the industry, with offices across the US, Dubai, and India. That year, Divyank orchestrated a $900 million sale of Media.net to a Chinese consortium, making it the third-largest ad-tech deal in history. Reflecting on the deal, Divyank told Quartz, “It wasn’t just about the numbers—it was about building something that could stand on its own.”
Bhavin has not fallen behind. In 2018, he founded Titan, a professional email startup that raised $30 million from Automattic the parent company of WordPress, its single largest investment ever, which valued Titan at $300 million. The email-suite was meant to help businesses schedule their mails, drop follow-up reminders allow users to work quickly and efficiently by providing email templates and frequently-used responses. "Our vision is to re-invent email for professionals and businesses. We aim to leverage our partnership with Automattic by targetting the right set of businesses to adopt the Titan email suite," Bhavin told CXO Today.
Today, Directi operates as a global tech conglomerate, with interests spanning domains, hosting, advertising, and beyond. From their humble beginnings coding in a Mumbai apartment, Directi now employs thousands of people around the globe and has offices around the world.
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